Punch Line
by purplegirl761
Summary: Either Drakken missed a cloning device demonstration somewhere, or this stuff wasn't fruit punch after all...
1. Chapter 1

_I AM ALIVE! Sorry it's taken me so long to upload something, but I haven't been feeling well. And I'll warn you, I don't know when I'll be able to finish this. That said, I hope you enjoy what I have so far._

_Loosely based on the "Villains' House Party" activity on "The Villain Files" DVD. Remember, kids, in real life it's not funny if someone gets drunk. But in real life, people can't shoot green flames from their hands, either._

_Many thanks to Slipgate for being my beta reader! :)  
><em>

**()()()()()()()()()**

Dr. Drakken re-unfolded the HenchCo pamphlet and read its contents for the one-hundred-and-twenty-third time. With every word, his pulse raced faster and faster, until he could feel it pounding up in his ears. It was a strange, exhilarating  
>- yes, that was a good word, <em>exhilarating<em>- sensation that always left him just a bit out of breath.

"You've worked hard all year, trying to determine which of your brilliantly wicked plans would be most likely to lead you down the path of successful conquest." Drakken nodded. That described him perfectly, even though he would have preferred for there to be a few exclamation points at the end. Successful conquest was the one of the most exciting phrases in the English languages, and it didn't deserve to be treated so lightly.

"You've attended HenchCo's Villain Conventions to be inspired by your fellow evildoers and purchased HenchCo's innovative new technology." Drakken scowled a little and grumbled under his breath. Only the first part of that was actually true - HenchCo's products were far too expensive for a frugal supervillain such as himself - but he read on anyway.

"You're long overdue for a night of fun and relaxation." Drakken nodded again. He hadn't been able to afford this year's Evil Family Picnic, either - choked him up just thinking about it. He couldn't remember the last time he and Shego had actually had fun together when they weren't lowering Kim Possible into one of his genius death traps. "Even supervillains and criminal masterminds," the brochure continued, "need a chance to unwind. Introducing the HenchCo Villain House Party - putting the 'fun' back in 'dysfunctional'."

Drakken looked up from the pamphlet and studied the sunset - orange and pink and purple and almost pretty enough to distract him from his thoughts. Unwind sounded nice, made him picture an evening with no prickles on his neck and itch in his chest and tight muscles in his back. Oooh - maybe this party would offer massages! That would be just wonderful. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine his back smooth and non-achy.

When he opened his eyes again, Shego was looking at him from the driver's seat of the hovercraft and giving him a sideways smile. "Excited, Dr. D?" she asked. Her voice sounded just as sarcastic as it always had, as if "excited" was a bad thing.

That meant it was probably time to tell a little white lie. "Of course not, Shego," Drakken snapped. Curse the way his voice shot up; it certainly didn't make him sound calm. "Why in the world would I be excited about one of Hench's self-promotional gatherings? Even if it does have skin-care booths - and mazes to test your genius - and probably lots of fun games to play!"

Only when Shego raised one dark eyebrow at him did Drakken realize he was saying all of this out loud, and his voice was getting higher and higher with each word. He stopped, coughed, harrumphed, grunted, and twisted his own eyebrow until it almost flipped upside-down. Okay. So the fib angle wasn't working. "All right, so, yes," Drakken admitted, tilting his chin to look his sidekick in the eye. If she saw that he was embarrassed, she'd get the upper hand, and then he'd get frustrated, and oh it would just be terrible. . .

Anyway. "I've been entirely too wrapped up in my work lately," Drakken continued. A yawn formed in his mouth, and he scrubbed at an eye that suddenly felt tired and droopy. "See? I need a night to relax and unwind."

"Hey, if it means you don't shoot through the roof every time I tap you on the shoulder, I'm all for it," Shego replied. She lifted the left side of her mouth at him, and he tilted his head, trying to figure out the pattern behind her expressions. Did the left side of her mouth going up mean she was happy and the right side annoyed, or was that the other way around? Twitchy lips meant he was amusing her - he knew that - and when her nostrils flared, she was angry, but other than that, it was really hard to read Shego's face.

"Well, that's just because you're so darn quiet," Drakken shot back. "You really need to start wearing, like, a bell around your neck or something."

Oooh. That must have been the wrong thing to say, because her nostrils poofed out a little. "A neck bell?" Shego asked, shooting her eyebrows so far up they almost left her forehead. "What do you think I am, a cow?"

Humph. Of course not. Drakken shook his head. "No, Shego. It's actually quite easy to tell that you're human - because you walk on two legs, and don't have enough hair to be an ape - I mean on your body, not on your head - because you've got plenty on hair on your head -"

"Drakken!" There was a chuckle in Shego's voice, and he felt himself relax just a smidge - whatever a smidge was. "Look, look -" she took one hand off the hovercraft's steering gear to wave it casually through the air - "don't bother pretending you're not excited. You're talking so fast I can't catch a word you're sayin'." She gave a tiny snort. "'Course, I'm not sure how much more sense it would make if you slowed down."

Ouch. Drakken flinched; that really hurt him inside. The prickles stabbed at his shoulders and a hot, angry churn started in his stomach, and he opened his mouth to yell the frustration out -

But the look on Shego's face stopped him. It was the kind of look his mother used to get when he was about to throw a tantrum, the type that said, Keep this up, and you won't go at all.

Drakken took the biggest, deepest breath his squeezy lungs would let in and turned his attention back to the brochure sitting in his lap. He turned it over and over in his hands, squinting at the pictures of other supervillains with shiny silk suits and faces that were as hard to read as Shego's. They didn't look like they were playing Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey or anything like that -

Not that I would want to play something so - so - so juvenile, anyway, Drakken reminded himself sternly. But a game of Guess-Which-Chemical-Makes-This-Smell was an entirely different story. He was a pro at that. Even when they blindfolded him and spun him in a circle to confuse his brain, he still did better than anyone else.

Everyone except Professor Dementor. Drakken felt his entire face slanting toward his chin in a fierce scowl (the one that had once sent an entire troop of Pixie Scouts running away in tears). Somehow, his rival always managed to beat him on the very last round. He must have figured out a way to cheat, because no one - absolutely no one - knew chemical smells better than Dr. Drakken.

Well, maybe - just maybe -

Yes! Drakken jolted himself forward on the hovercraft seat, wincing when his seat belt smacked him backward. Since he was such a wickedly creative genius, maybe he could exchange one of the sample chemicals for his own mind-control compound. Then, when Dementor took a big old whiff of it, he would become a helpless piece of Silly Putty in Drakken's hands, totally under his control, doomed to do his bidding for all time!

And he'd win the game.

Drakken straightened his shoulders against the hovercraft's seat to keep them from wiggling with excitement and grinned down at the pamphlet sitting in his lap. And there, written in straight, maroon, very official-looking font, were two words he'd missed until now. Two of the sweetest words in the English language.

**Refreshments provided.**

That kept him from minding quite so much that he'd left all his mind control compounds at home.

**()()()()()()()**  
>Drakken frowned to himself as he wrapped his arm tightly around the banister and hopped from one step to the next (in an amazing display of agility, he thought proudly). He hardly recognized HenchCo's basement without a Doomsday device in every corner and dozens of Jack Hench's other, small but still outrageously expensive products displayed on tables. It was the same room - the ceiling was still gray, the carpet was still red, there were still cool little booths along one wall, the steps still squeaked under his feet - but it looked a lot bigger. Brighter. More intimidating.<p>

Intimidating. Good word. Great concept, provided you were on the right end of it. Right now, Drakken wasn't, and he didn't like that. It made the hairs prickle up on the back of his neck.

So he narrowed his eyes and lifted his lip in disdain (another good word). At least he could look like he was on the right end. Maybe that would be enough to fool people until he could figure out how to be there again.

Unfortunately, Drakken's menacing narrow eyes threw off his depth perception, and he missed the next stair. His left foot flailed wildly, looking for something to come down, finding nothing. He tumbled, head over heels, down the rest of the stairs, smacking his knees on the next-to-last step and thonking the last one with his head. The sickening thud scared him more than the sudden pain.

He landed, face-first, on Hench's carpet. It felt fuzzy on his cheeks, and it smelled like it had just been washed. How, Drakken wondered, did you wash a carpet anyway? Vacuum it, sure - but vacuums smelled hot and rubbery. This stuff was more like laundry detergent. Its fake-flower scent tickled his nose and made him sneeze, right on top of it.

Oh, well. Drakken pushed himself up to his knees, swiped at his nose, and tried not to look as embarrassed as he felt. So much for the clean carpet.

Beside him, Shego rolled her eyes, and his insides got that squirmy feeling he always got when he was being disapproved of. "You always have to make an entrance, don't you?" she asked.

Drakken waited for the right words, the ones that would make her understand and respect him and get that mocking twinkle out of her eyes. But the only things that came to him were a grunt and a hiss and a frustrated blurt of, "I didn't do it on purpose!"

"Yeah. Doy." Shego gave her sarcastic laugh, grabbed his hand, and pulled him to his feet. While he swiped at his burning cheeks, she scanned the room with her eyes, like she had some kind of infrared cameras in them that would tell her exactly where to go. "Okay, look. I'm gonna go find some girls to hang out with. You think you can entertain yourself for a couple of hours?"

Drakken would have answered, but a light bulb on the ceiling had caught his eye. It had looked burned out when he'd arrived, but now he saw that was blinking. On and off. On and off. It looked like it was flashing a secret message in Morse Code. Ooh, maybe he should add that to his latest evil plan! Communicate to his robot armies in Morse Code. He shivered with delicious, villainous delight.

"I'll take that glazed look in your eyes as a 'yes,'" a voice said dryly. He whipped his head around and saw Shego. When did she get here?

She reached out and caught his arm, sharp glove-claws snagging on the fabric of his lab coat. "But, before I go - what have we learned about HenchCo get-togethers?"

Drakken groaned under his breath. Was she really going to make him recite it - right here, right now? He started to shift from foot to foot. "If I do not know what a machine does," he said slowly, carefully, making sure to pronounce each word correctly, "pushing every single button on it is not the way to find out."

Shego raised one eyebrow all the way up into her bangs. "And?"

There was more? Drakken shrugged his shoulders up to his ears. "I don't know."

"Here's a hint." Shego jerked her head toward the refreshment table.

Hmm. Drakken tapped one finger to his chin as he pondered that. Refreshment table. Food. Eating. Chewing. Swallowing. Not playing with it - "My food is not a toy, it is for my tummy to enjoy?" he guessed.

The instant the words were out of his mouth, Drakken knew they were wrong. Shego let out a very loud guffaw that made heat rise up to his cheeks. They were probably turning the same pinky-red shade as his mother's hair.

Ugh. Mother. That had been her rule, not Shego's.

"Uh, close," Shego got out between chuckles, "but no cigar, Doc. Try again."

Drakken scowled at her. Well, why would he even want a cigar? He'd never smoked in his life - the one time Eddy had tried in middle school was enough to scare them both off it. . .

_FOCUS, Drakken._

Okay. He pushed his lips together and rolled his eyes up so far he could actually see part of his eyebrow, but he couldn't think of anything else. He looked at Shego, who was still waiting for his answer, and shrugged again.

"How about this?" Shego leaned in toward him and lowered her voice, which he was grateful for. If she was going to mock him, at least no one else would hear it. "Don't eat yourself sick this year."

The heat came back, roaring in his ears this time. He ground his teeth together so hard he could almost hear them squeaking. Ooh. That kind of hurt, and Drakken remembered his dentist telling him that was bad for the enamel on them -

"Ring any bells?" Shego pinched at the air with two fingers and swung her hand back and forth, like she was ringing a bell. Yep. Definitely mocking him. Pain or no pain, Drakken gritted his teeth even harder.

It did a ring a bell - a whole choir of them, as a matter of fact - but there was no way he was going to give her the satisfaction of knowing that. He just folded his arms over his chest and glowered down at her (why couldn't she shrink, just this once?) until she shook her head, laughed again, and walked away, leaving him alone.

_Alone_.

Drakken shifted from foot to foot, trying to get rid of the nasty itch in his chest. He liked being alone sometimes. Like when he was working out the details of his latest brilliant plan, and he needed to be able to focus on it and not be distracted by Shego rolling her eyes and making fun of it. Or when he was in the shower, of course.

But not here. Not now. The whole point of coming was to be around other people, to amaze them with his genius! Not to stand here by himself while DNAmy chased Monkey Fist around the room and Dementor looked at him like he was a funny little boy instead of a fierce mad scientist who would one day have control of the entire planet. That wasn't the way things were supposed to be. Drakken suddenly felt very lonely and conspicuous, like a giant blue base in a room full of acids.

His eyes wandered back to the refreshment table. At least that was familiar. That was safe. Maybe he could just -

Yes! Drakken felt a smile slip across his face as a plan began to take shape in his brilliant mind. He'd hang out by the refreshment table - talk to his fellow villains when they came by to get something to eat - and he'd have a snack - just a little one - and he wouldn't make himself sick - and Shego would see that he really could learn from his mistakes, and she'd be proud of him. And things would be the way they were supposed to be, after all.

The itch in Drakken's chest went away. Having a plan always soothed it - even if it wasn't a plan for dominating the world, at least he felt like he knew what to do.

He even remembered to cross the room using his villainous swagger, instead of running as fast as he could and tumbling over his own feet. He felt his spine getting straighter and his strides more confident the more he thought about it. Especially when he saw who was standing at the refreshment table, leaning on a bag of golf clubs.

Duff Killigan. He wasn't the nicest guy Drakken had ever met, but he wasn't Dementor, either. And all he wanted to do was cover the world in grass and turn it into a giant golf course, which wasn't exactly evil. Weird, maybe, but not evil. Which meant he would be very impressed when he heard about all the wonderfully wicked things Drakken had been up to lately.

"Hello, everyone!" Drakken cried, snatching up a plate. "Dr. Drakken has arrived!"

He paused and waited to hear cheers. Applause. Heck, he would have settled for someone yelling back, "Hi, Drakken!"

Instead, Killigan barely glanced at him - sideways, out of the corners of his eyes, in that way Drakken himself could never do without going cross-eyed. "Hello, lad," he said with an annoyed sigh. The itch came back.

Next to him, two big guys nudged each other and pointed at Drakken. It was like they were making fun of him, and he hadn't even done anything yet! Made sense, though. He could tell by their gray uniforms and their muscle-y bodies - even bigger than his own henchmen, which was a little scary - that they worked for Dementor.

Drakken whipped his head away from them and folded his arms across his chest. Fine, let them laugh at him! He'd just ignore them. They weren't worth the effort it took to get mad at them.

But he couldn't resist peeking back over his shoulder, just a quick one to make sure they were done laughing. They were. In fact, they were talking to Duff - something about some new stretchy golf club he was working on, which wouldn't break if he got mad and twisted it in half - just as if Drakken had never been there at all. It was worse than being laughed at.

Now his chest was so itchy, it felt like there was a big leaf of poison ivy where his heart should have been. (Which, now that he thought about it, was scientifically impossible, not to mention fatal.) Drakken snatched up a helpless brownie and took a fierce bite - and smiled.

How could he not? It was warm and chocolatey and melted perfectly in his mouth. It was hard to stay mad while chewing something that delicious.

Drakken closed his eyes to savor the taste. It's okay, he told himself. Everything's all right. And by the time the brownie was gone, he actually believed it again.

He ran his tongue over his teeth and frowned to himself. There were still some little brownie chunks stuck in his back molars. Yummy - but annoying. He grabbed the punch ladle and filled a glass with thick, red punch. That ought to wash it out. Drakken raised the glass to his lips and gulped three big chugs.

Yikes. Not the taste he was expecting. It was sticky and sweet, just like it was supposed to be, but there was something else in there. A taste that wasn't exactly bitter, not exactly sweet, not exactly sour, and definitely not salty. Just a little extra - "kick", they would probably call it on Food Network. Drakken closed his eyes and coughed - he wasn't sure if he liked it or not - and then swallowed hard.

The punch went hot and scratchy down his throat, which didn't feel good at all, but once it was settled in his stomach - yeah, that was nice. Warm and comforting. He felt the glow all the way up to his face.

Drakken opened his eyes and saw Dementor's henchmen and Killigan squinting at him with curious eyes, waiting for his verdict. They must not have tried the punch yet, he realized. They were waiting for him to tell them if it was any good or not! The thought made his chest puff out.

"Mmmm, yes, I like it," he finally said slowly, feeling like a great connoisseur. That was another word he'd learned from Food Network. (It meant someone who knew everything there was to know about food and drinks.) "A little bit of an edge to it, though. Not quite bitter, but almost." He paused for a wise nod, chest glowing warmer and warmer by the minute. "Very exotic. What's in this?" Drakken pointed to his glass and glanced at his awestruck audience. "Is it pomegranate? I've heard that's very hot this season."

Duff tilted his head to one side, looking more confused than Drakken felt. One of Dementor's henchmen slapped both hands over his mouth like he was trying not to laugh. Good grief, could he not do anything without getting laughed at around here?

But the other one grinned from ear to ear and clapped him on the back, so hard Drakken could almost hear the discs in his back screeching out of alignment. "Yeah, pal. Pomegranate. Good, isn't it?"

Drakken tilted his head to the side, too. Had one of Dementor's henchmen actually talked to him - like he was a human being? Almost nicely?

Well, of course he had! Drakken threw his shoulders back and stood up as straight and tall as he could, trying to ignore the fact that his head still only came up to the other man's shoulder. After all, he was so much brillianter than this guy's boss. He probably - secretly admired him. They all probably did!

He felt his face glow even brighter. Yes! This was fantastic! Even his arch-rival's hired hands were in awe of his genius! And he had someone to talk to, after all!

"So," Drakken grinned up at his new friend, "who wants to hear about what happened to me after the Attitudinator broke at the last convention?"

Duff wagged his head back and forth and chuckled, which he decided to take as a "yes." Even better, both of Dementor's goons nodded and leaned toward him to listen. He couldn't see their eyes behind those sunglasses they always wore, but he knew they had to be wide open and fascinated. "Sure, tell us," the first one said.

Drakken saw movement out of the corner of his eye, and he turned his head - quickly, sneakily - to see Dementor himself edging closer. He must be coming to hear the story, too. Even he was secretly interested!

Drakken felt a grin slide across his face. He raised his glass again and gulped another take - whoa, where did that come from? - took another gulp of punch.


	2. Chapter 2

_My late Christmas/New Year present to y'all. Hope you enjoy!_

_Thanks to Slipgate for his awesome beta-reader-ness. _

**Chapter Two**

". . . and then, I shall plant my ferocious army of robotic sea creatures in the oceans! My shark's reinforced-titanium teeth will be able to bite open and sink the toughest ship, and my octopuses - octopi - octopisces - whatever - their laser eyes shall be capable of downing any aircraft! International trade will plummet! Chaos will spread like a bad case of the measles! The world will be mine!"

Drakken grinned at his captive audience. Well, they weren't _really_ captives, since he wasn't holding them hostage or anything. They _chose_ to be here, listening to him explain his latest evil plan and marveling at his brilliant superior (superiorly brilliant?) mind. Dementor and most of his henchmen, Duff Killigan, and some blurry-faced people he didn't know, but who were obviously fans of his work - they were all paying attention in a way he would have quadrupled Shego's paycheck for. Nodding and making little impressed noises in all the right places. Eyes in big, admiring circles. Not even snickering when he stumbled over his words. It was sheer bliss - he liked that word, _bliss_. . .

He threw back his head and laughed his most villainous laugh, so long and loud and booming he almost scared himself. (He _loved_ doing that.)

That gave him a warm, happy feeling in his stomach, next to the brownie and the punch. Drakken hugged his arms over his chest so he could hang onto it. He didn't want it to leave.

"That is a most BRILLIANT PLAN," Dementor hollered. "I surely wish I had THOUGHT OF IT FIRST!"

Drakken grinned bigger than he'd thought his mouth could ever go. Sure enough, Dementor was jealous. So jealous he was _admitting_ how amazing his plan was! Could this night get any better?

Still - Drakken frowned - Dementor didn't have to yell that for the entire room to hear. What if some bad, uncreative person overheard and - and - and _stole_ his idea? The thought was so terrible, he almost gasped out loud.

"Yeah, but - shhhh!" Drakken tried to press a finger to his lips, but that was suddenly hard - his hands were shaking a bit. Must have been from the excitement. "Shhh-shh-shh!" He hissed through his teeth, feeling saliva shoot out of his mouth. "It's a secret!" he added in as whispery a voice as he could manage. "A secret plan. Got it? Got it? Got it?" He bulged his eyes at Dementor to make _sure_ he got it.

"_Ja_, of course," Dementor said with a big smile. "Mine lips have ZIPPERS!" He ran a finger across his lips like he was zipping them shut, then pretended to lock them and throw away the key for good measure.

Drakken burst out laughing. He'd seen people do that before - lots of times, in fact - but it had never been hilarious like it was now. How could he have ever considered this nice man with the great sense of humor as an enemy? "You know," he admitted happily, "I used to hate you, but now I can't remember why."

Dementor's smile grew even bigger. Even his mouth was square, which was incredibly funny, Drakken realized. "I am so glad to HEAR it!" he cried, sounding every bit as delighted as Drakken felt. "Let us let bygones be themselves!"

Drakken bumped around in his brain for a reply to that. He wanted to find some ingenious, thought-provoking. . . uh. . . thought. Maybe something about forgiving your enemies and living in peace, something from those anti-war rallies he used to see on TV when he was little - but all that came out was "Yes!"

Dementor didn't look at him like he'd said something stupid, though. Matter of fact, if his smile got any bigger, it would slide right off his face. Now _that_ would be funny. "I propose a TOAST!" he shouted. "To our newfound friendship!"

Oh. Toast. That meant they clinked glasses. Proud of himself for remembering that - his head kinda hurt - Drakken grabbed his glass and held it high. Not too high, though, since Dementor was so short, and he needed to be able to reach it.

Dementor gave him a playful scowl. "Oh, Drakken, you silly boy." Normally, those words would make prickles poke up on the back of Drakken's neck, but Dementor said them friendly-ly - friendily - whatever - he didn't sound mean. "Your glass is almost empty. You need to get a FRESH one if you are going to MAKE A TOAST!"

Oh. Drakken blinked down at his glass and felt himself go cross-eyed. He didn't know that was a rule. But, as much as an evil genius as he was, he hadn't had a lot of experience with toasts. Dementor sounded like he knew what he was talking about - he was probably right. "Okay," he agreed.

He reached for the ladle, and then stopped. . . was he left or right-handed? He suddenly couldn't remember.

Why had he just thought that? Drakken shook his head, hard, trying to fling away the fuzzy feeling. He was left-handed. Had been for his entire life, except for about twenty minutes in second grade, when that one substitute had insisted that _all_ kids could make their right hand dominant if they just tried hard enough. But she was wrong, because he'd tried as hard as he could, but he still smudged all his words and his _real_ teacher couldn't read what he wrote when she was grading the next day. It was the only time he ever got below a B+ on a science test.

Now, spelling tests, those he flunked all the time, but. . . why was he thinking about this? Drakken flashed his best villainous snarl at the memory and moved on.

He grabbed the ladle and - whoa, that was strange. He was holding the thing - could feel its cold metal even through his glove - but it looked like his hand was going straight _through_ it. That wasn't even scientifically possible.

Drakken blinked twelve times in a row and brought his right hand, the ladleless one, up to his eyes. He scrubbed at them with his fists until his eyelids hurt. When he opened them again, what he saw made sense: his left hand, with his fingers wrapped tightly around the ladle like he was expecting it to run away. That was - Drakken chuckled to himself - a little silly. It was an inanimate object, and inanimate objects couldn't move on their own, even if they _were_ an amazing shape - like a giant spoon - and very shiny.

Anyway. He scooped punch into the ladle, dumped the ladle into his glass and then his fingers slipped and the ladle fell into the punch bowl, splashing him and soaking in a splotch on his lab coat.

But he wasn't embarrassed. Not tonight. He was feeling way too good to let it bother him. He felt warm and content and a little bit sleepy, the way he did after a big dinner. He threw back his head and laughed with all the joy bubbling up inside his stomach.

His audience threw back their heads and laughed, too. Not we're-making-fun-of-you laughs. The way you laughed when you were sharing a joke with your Very Best Friends.

Drakken felt himself glow even brighter. He drained his glass in five big chugs. Mmmm. That punch must have been an acquired taste, like Mother always used to say about broccoli, because this glass tasted a lot better than the last one. The kick that had made him cough was gone. Kick, cough, hone. Kick, cough, gone. That sounded funny - funny ha-ha _and_ funny strange. Like one big, long, silly word. Kickcoughgone.

Drakken licked some of the punch off his lips and savored the taste. It was sweet and juicy, like grape soda but - better somehow. A lot better.

Yeah. He hiccuped a little - must have drunk the punch too fast. Drank? Drunken? Dranken? Hey, that almost sounded like his name. Dranken. Drakken. Dranken. Drakken. Kickcoughgone. Drakken laughed again and, just like last time, everyone laughed with him.

"Laugh and the world laughs with you," Mother used to tell him. Turned out she was right. She usually was, much as he hated to admit it.

And to think he'd been worried about having no one to hang out with tonight! Well, look at him now - he was popular. He was - what was that teen slang phrase he'd learned a while back? - off the henhouse or something. He was big man on campus. He was rockin' it!

()()()()()()()()()

He was - _dizzy_.

Drakken put his punch glass down. It was hard; stupid table seemed to be bending away from him - and put both hands up to the sides of his achy head. The room was starting to spin in circles, like some fun house at an amusement park, only it wasn't fun. His stomach wasn't just warm anymore, it was _hot_. Not exactly upset, but it had definitely stopped being happy.

"So, anyway -" Drakken licked his droolly-feeling lips and tried to ignore the whirling room. Probably just another one of Hench's ridiculous publicity stunts, like the giant inflatable death ray last year. "That's why I think lightning bug bulbs should be replaced with fluorescents." He gave twelve quick nods to emphasize the genius of that idea. "Much more energy-efficient."

Drakken glanced down at Dementor to see how he was taking that and felt his eyebrow furrow in confusion. His former rival looked really funny - even shorter than usual. Much rounder. Blue-tinged instead of yellow. And his head was shaped almost exactly like a lampshade.

Dementor's henchmen nudged each other and laughed, and Drakken laughed with them, even though he didn't get the joke. Maybe those were just oh-wow-this-guy-is-brilliant-I'm-so-amazed laughs. He hoped so. He really did.

The funny-looking Dementor didn't laugh, though. Didn't even move, which was very surprising. Usually he could be heard cackling, louder than any of the villains except, of course, for Drakken himself - a noise as shrill as a ten-year-old girl's, but thick with evil that gave Drakken a few goosebumps. _Used_ to give him goosebumps. Before they became friends.

Monkey Fist ran by just then, down on all fours like Commodore Puddles, and distracted him from Dementor's nonlaughingness. Monkey Fist was always interesting, with the fur on the backs of his hands and feet and the way he ranted about something called "Mystical Monkey Power." Drakken could never figure out his motive, either. Did he want to be a monkey? Conquer the world? Be a world-conquering monkey?

But tonight Monkey Fist fascinated Drakken even more than usual. There were two of them - no, three - all identical. All moving at the same time, in the same way. Could you spontaneously duplicate yourself if you had Mystical Monkey Power, whatever it was? If you could, he wanted some!

Four DNAmys (Amies?), all with big smiles on their freckly faces, bolted after the Monkey Fists. He knew that smile, the one that made you feel like you ruled the world when she beamed it at you. The one that made your knees go weak and your stomach get the most wonderful flutters in it.

Drakken pushed away the hurt that twinged at his heart and replaced it with bitterness. DNAmy was nothing but another villain whose partnership with him had ended in disaster, just like it had with Duff Killigan that one time a couple years back. Seeing Killigan didn't make him want to cry. Why should DNAmy be any different? Even if her hands _were _gentle and soft, and she _did_ smell like dryer sheets and cookie dough and home. . .

None of that mattered anymore, he knew. What mattered was that there were four of her running around, and she didn't have Mystical Monkey Power. Just genetics knowledge, which meant there had to be a scientific explanation. There always was, Drakken reminded himself.

He felt his face spring into a smile. There was obviously a cloning machine somewhere around here! And he was going to find it, test it, and if he was happy with the results - Drakken paused for a wicked chortle - _steal_ it. Oh, he was so evil, sometimes he almost scared himself.

Drakken whipped his head around eagerly. The whole room blurred, seemed to tilt dizzily away from him, and for a terrible second, he was sure he was going to fall on his face. He stuck his arms out behind him and fumbledty-fumbled for the table. His fingers caught the edge of it, and he curled them around it and squeezed as hard as he could. Panting, he let his _eyes_ search the room, careful to keep his head still so that - whatever it had been - wouldn't happen again.

Hmm. Drakken pulled his forehead into folds and wrinkled his nose against the pain that shot through his head. He didn't see anything that resembled a cloning machine. No giant boxes with glass doors or huge curtains. No wonderfully ominous-looking rays. Not even little helmets with buttons and levers, like the Attitudinator.

"Hmmm" turned into "humph!" It must have been hidden away in some back room. Or maybe it was disguised as something else, the way he had once made a giant electricity controller that looked exactly like a sofa. Which had worked great until woke up at 4:15 AM with a nightmare and had gone out to sit on the couch to calm down but had forgotten which was the real one and which one was the Doomsday device. Drakken shuddered at the memory. Lost his favorite pair of bunny slippers that night.

Anyway. He shook his achy head to get it back on track. He'd have to go up to Jack Hench, who was all the way across the room with five clones of his own, and ask him where it was, and he wasn't sure he could do that. He was woozy, and his legs felt like woot needles. Net woodles.

_Oh, come on!_ Drakken shook his head, trying to get it to start working again. Wet noodles - that was it!

Drakken turned around to see if maybe Dementor wouldn't mind asking Hench _for_ him, since they were pals now. Six eyes stared back at him. Green, narrow eyes that reminded him of a cat's.

He blinked. Shego?

More like Shego_s_. She'd tried the cloning machine, too, only it must have malfunctioned, because the two other clones were only half of a person, and they were still sort of attached to the edges of the middle Shego. Very odd sight. Especially since Shego had never been a fan of cloning. She always turned down his demand - err, his offer - to duplicate her. He wasn't sure why - Kim Possible wouldn't stand a chance if she outnumbered her.

Well, maybe she had finally changed her mind. Maybe she had gone and cloned herself as a surprise present for him, a really late Christmas gift. . . or a really early one, depending on which Christmas it was for. The thought didn't make him as happy as it should have.

Drakken forced his trembling lips into a smile. "Hey, Shego," he said. Tried to say. His tongue felt too big for his mouth, thick and slimy. "Some party, eh?"

Shego gaped at him, the way she had when he'd gotten his hand stuck down the bathtub drain. It was her _Drakken-you-can't-possibly-be-this-dumb look_, and it made no sense to use it right now. "Dr. D," she said, in a disbelieving tone that matched her face. "You're drunk!"


	3. Chapter 3

_Yes, believe it or not, I'm still living. Here's Chapter Three - we're about halfway done. Isn't that exciting? :)_

_Thanks to Slipgate for being my beta reader._

Drakken burst out laughing. He didn't mean to and he could tell by the look on Shego's face that she wasn't happy with him, but he couldn't help it. Shego had just made a joke. A really, really funny, ridiculous joke, even if he didn't remember exactly what it was right now.

"No, no, no, no, no, no, no!" Drakken protested - he had to keep saying it until Shego got it and that look disappeared from her face. He gave her his biggest grin, and saliva drooled out of his mouth without exit permission. "That's crashy."

Ugh. That word came out weird. "Crazhy. Crasszy." Drakken opened his mouth as wide as he could and stretched his lips across his teeth so that his words would sound right. It was suddenly hard. "Cra-a-azy." There. That was it. "I'm jusht here talking to my good buddy Dementor." He smiled down at Dementor. He'd back him up. He'd tell Shego exactly what was going on, and she'd understand. People always seemed to understand Dementor. Maybe that was part of why his plans worked better.

But Dementor didn't say anything, and Shego's face got even pointier. "Okay, first of all -" Shego sliced her hands through the air, and Drakken watched them in awe. "You hate Dementor's guts. And second of all - that's a table lamp."

Oh. That explained why Dementor was being so quiet. And why his head looked like a lampshade.

But then, where was the _real_Dementor? Surely he wouldn't just leave without telling him good-bye. After all, they were pals now.

Weren't they?

Shego shook black her back hair - back her black hair - turned to Duff and said something. Drakken didn't hear exactly what it was, because his head was buzzing and he could have sworn he was starting to hear music. Slow, winding, loopy-sounding music, the kind they played on cartoons when someone got clonked on the head. Hench must have been playing a - a - a - what were those things called? They were like records, only smaller and shinier. . .

Duff shook his shoulders and shrugged his head - no, wait, it was the other way around. That must not have been the answer Shego wanted, because she flung her hands into the air and gave a Very Loud Sigh.

Drakken giggled to himself as he watched Shego go up to one of Dementor's henchmen - Shego go, that sounded silly - and ask him something. The henchman smirked at her, and Drakken flinched. It was never a good idea to smirk at Shego, especially when she looked as frustrated as she did right now.

He leaned in closer to see what was going to happen, and the floor suddenly seemed way too close. He felt himself tilting forward. Didn't know how to stop it. Probably _couldn't_stop it.

Until arms reached out and grabbed him. They were small arms - not even as long or as big around as his - but they were strong. Sturdy somehow. Yanked him back to his feet and then held him upright. They almost made him feel safe.

"I don't suppose _you_remember how much you had to drink," the arm-owner muttered. Shego.

It was the most hilariously random and randomly hilarious thing she could have possibly asked. Drakken couldn't help it - giggles bubbled up in his throat and burst out of his mouth. A belch came with them - he couldn't help that either.

"Lovely." Shego fanned the air in front of her with her hand and pointed at him with her eyes. "Look, look -" She raked a hand through her hair, which Drakken had only seen her do a few times before. "Sit down." She put both hands on his shoulders and pushed him into a sitting position in the nearest booth.

_Ahhh_. He hadn't realized just how tired his legs were. Them and everything else. He yawned and stretched and tried to rub at his bleary eyes.

If the room could stop spinning, that would be really great.

"Now - _stay here_." Shego put up her hand like she was training Commodore Puddles to stay. "I'm going to go talk to someone about this little predicament we find ourselves in." Her words were barely squeezing out from between her clenched teeth, but they still sounded sarcastic. He laughed a little - nobody could do sarcasm like Shego.

"Okay," Drakken mumbled. He folded his arms carefully on the tabletop and gingerly - what a strange word, _gingerly_- rested his head on them, but it still made him dizzy. "I'm jus' gonna take a little nap."

He glanced up just in time to see Shego roll all twelve of her eyes. "Yeah, why don't you do that?" With that, she stalked off, arms pumping angrily at her sides, leaving Drakken wondering what he'd done wrong _this_time. He buried his face in the little cave he'd made with his folded-up arms and bit back a whimper. His head was really starting to hurt.

Drakken let his eyes sag shut and listened to the noises of the room. Everything sounded as blurry and wobbly as it looked. He could hear people talking, glasses clinking, footsteps stepping, but it all seemed very, very far away, like he was on another planet by himself. That was the loneliest thought he'd ever had, and he could feel his bottom lip trembling.

But two voices poked their way through the fogginess of his brain. Two voices he would know anywhere. Shego and Dementor.

He could hear Shego yelling - that was never a good sign - and Dementor yelling back - but, for Dementor that was Standard Operating Procedure. SOP. That was a funny word. Sop. Sop. Sop. Drakken chuckled to himself, which made the punch bounce in his stomach.

Oooh. He swallowed hard, throat muscles trembling. All of a sudden, he didn't feel so great. He squeezed his eyes even tighter and tried not to think about the brownie that was turning circles in his stomach.

He put a hand gingerly - there was that silly word again - to his middle, which gurgled and grumbled angrily under his palm. Why was it doing that? He'd only had the one brownie. That wasn't enough to make him sick. That wasn't enough to make _anybody_sick.

He didn't understand it. Didn't understand anything. His brain was tangled into so many knots, he could barely push a clear thought through. Drakken had never felt like this - not ever, even when he hadn't slept for ninety-two hours straight. If he wasn't such a fierce supervillain, it might be kind of scary.

Maybe - maybe the punch had been really sugary. That could have upset his stomach. Yeah. That was probably it. After all, Shego had asked him how much of it he'd had to drink. Darn old Shego and the way she always figured things out first, even though _he_was supposed to be the evil mastermind.

Footsteps pounded by the booth then. The thumps echoed in Drakken's sore head. He heard Shego's voice - yelling again - and Jack Hench's voice - not yelling, of course. Hench never yelled, which kind of creeped Drakken out. It was _unnatural_. You could blow up HenchCo's entire cafeteria, and the worst Hench would do was talk through clenched teeth. He knew, because he'd accidentally done that once with the Supersonic Robo-Claw 800. Its big red button had been so big and red and shiny that he hadn't seen the "Do not touch" sign until it was too late.

The footsteps thumped again, closer this time. Drakken felt someone shake him by the shoulder, and it flipped everything inside him upside-down. He licked his lips to get rid of the bad taste he suddenly had in his mouth and lifted his head off the table. It felt heavy and stuffed, the way his stomach had felt last year after he'd eaten his weight in funnel cakes. He shook it back and forth, as hard as he could, to get rid of the way-too-full feeling. It worked. A little too well, because his head grew so light and empty-feeling he was sure it was going to float away. He moaned under his breath.

"Well, come on, Otis Campbell." Shego and her malfunctioning clones were standing over him, hips on their hands. . . hands on their hips. (He was so dizzy.) "Let's get you home so you can sleep it off."

Drakken could feel his eyes crossing, making the room even blurrier. His name was Dr. Drakken, not Otis Campbell. Did Shego have him confused with some other mad scientist? How could she? She knew him too well - and surely no one else here was blue, were they? And what did "sleep it off" mean? He couldn't think of anything that would come off while he slept. Maybe a scab. . .

He wanted to ask her about all of those - and maybe even more - but Shego's face was getting that pointy look that told him she _really_meant business. She didn't answer questions when she had her pointy-business-face on. But he was so confused - but his mouth was so dry he wasn't sure he'd be able to talk anyway - but he really needed to know what was going on - but he felt bad enough without getting hit with Shego's green plasma -

Fine. He'd ask the questions when he was home, safe, in his own lair.

_Home. Safe._Those words sounded so good, Drakken ran them through his mind six or seven more times. They made his heart thrash around in his chest a little less wildly. It was strange - his lair was designed to be intimidating, perfect for an evil genius with its big, dark rooms filled with Doomsday devices and its super-high ceilings so that his tall henchmen wouldn't bump their heads. But, somehow, it was a lot less scary than HenchCo's shiny, swirly basement.

And that was all he wanted, Drakken realized now. To be safe at home in his own bed, sleeping it off, whatever "it" was. He had to get back to his lair.

He staggered to his feet and promptly tripped over them. The floor tilted up to meet him, and Drakken closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, preparing for impact. He was probably going to land right on his nose, hard, and it would bleed and he didn't like bleeding because bleeding hurt. . .

Suddenly, Drakken felt his momentum come to a halt. Those same strong little arms wrapped around his waist and held him tight. The floor stayed where it was. He let out a big breath of relief.

"Whoa, there, sport," Shego whispered in his ear. "How 'bout we try to stay upright?"

Drakken blinked at the blurry floor and nodded. He liked that idea.

Shego yanked him back up, and his stomach went down. Then up. Then sideways. Then -

_Oh no._

"Shego," Drakken hissed frantically through his teeth. "My tummy hurts." That didn't begin to describe the horrible thing that was happening in his gut, but it was all he dared to say. His heart thumpety-thumped in his chest, hurting his rib cage. He tried to bring a hand up to cover his mouth, but his hand couldn't find his mouth and it was shaking so hard - his hand, not his mouth - that he wasn't sure what good it would do anyway.

It was enough for Shego to understand, though. She put an arm around his shoulders and steered him toward a row of trashcans at the back of the room. _Big_trashcans, as high as his waist and shaped like donuts.

Ugh. Donuts. Suddenly they were all Drakken could think about. Hot ones, fresh ones, big ones, small ones, glazed ones, chocolate ones, jelly-filled ones. Fresh off the griddle - or whatever you cooked donuts in or on - the light glistening on their shiny, greasy batter. Their gooey chocolate icing. Their crunchy rainbow sprinkles.

That did it. He leaned forward over the trashcan and he threw up in huge chokes that hurt his chest and made his eyes water.

Yeah. Eyes watering. Very common during regurgitation. He wasn't crying - not babyish, embarrassing tears - in front of his fellow, significantly less fearsome, villains.

Throwing up was bad enough. He could hear faint, far-away groans and muffled laughter, like he was on a game show and had just gotten the easiest question wrong. Shego groaned, too, and turned him around so that he was hitting the middle trashcan instead of the left. He wasn't sure why it mattered, but the laughter got even louder and harsher.

A tear - hopefully just a reflex one - slid out of Drakken's left eye, over the scar, down his face, and got lost in the little dip between his nose and his mouth. (What was that stupid thing called, anyway?) It made him feel soggy and sloppy and horrible.

The same people that had clapped him on the back and laughed with him were now laughing _at_him, in that mean way he knew all too well. And, just like that, he wasn't the popular guy who'd been the life of the party what seemed like hours ago. He was the same silly, stupid Drakken he'd been last year, the one who had no one to hang out with, the one who had drowned his sorrows in funnel cakes, until his stomach was so full his bellybutton was about to pop off.

No - worse than that. He was Drew Lipsky, back in seventh grade, gagging over a much smaller trashcan during his science class's lizard dissection. He'd told himself over and over again, while they set up the stations, that this was important research, that great scientists couldn't afford to be squeamish. But they'd made that first cut - and he could see its little brain - and he'd lost that nasty cafeteria hot lunch, while the girls shrieked with horror and the boys laughed and punched each other and the teacher he was in love with rubbed his back like he was a sick little kid.

Drakken gave one final, weak cough and swiped his sleeve across his mouth. His head was starting to get that floaty feeling again, and his eyes were burning like his contacts were made of molten lava instead of plastic. Lava was great to put in your death traps, but not in your eyes. His middle felt hollow from losing everything in it.

_Ohhhh_. He pulled away from the trashcan and folded his arms over his stomach. He _hated_ throwing up, just _hated_it. There was something so - so - so - disconcerting (that was a good word) and almost scary about his digestive system working backward. Especially when he'd only had one brownie and a few glasses of punch, because he was trying so hard not to make himself sick this year, so that Shego wouldn't get mad at him. . . and so he wouldn't be sick. . .

Drakken closed his eyes to see if that would make it all go away. It didn't. He could still hear the nasty chuckles, feel the shakiness that started in his tummy and spread to his arms, his legs, and his head.

He grabbed back onto the trashcan so he wouldn't fall right through the floor and let his eyes pop back open. It didn't matter, he thought. Nothing he saw could make him feel worse than he already did.

But he was wrong. When Drakken lifted his head and tried (unsuccessfully) to blink the room into focus, _she_was standing only a few feet away.

DNAmy.

Even through the blur, he could see her freckles, like little dots of cinnamon on her round sugar-cookie face. That face that had always looked at him so kindly, with sparkly eyes and a big happy smile, the face that made him think he was special to her. . .

Her hand was up over her mouth, but he wasn't close enough to read the look in her little black eyes. Was she amused? Disgusted? Did he dare to hope she was worried about him? Or was she just one of those people who got sick when she watched someone else barf, the way he was?

Drakken shook his head, hard, ponytail slapping painfully against his cheeks. Why should he care so much what DNAmy thought of him? Her opinion was no more important than any of the other villains'. Matter of fact, it was probably _less_important, since she was hardly evil at all. Just very smart - and sweet - and good - and he cared what she thought, even though he shouldn't. He cared so much it made his chest sag, and that was worse than the itch.

A watery film - the thin-layer kind, not the movie kind - formed over Drakken's eyes, making his vision even fuzzier. For a minute he didn't recognize the tall, hairy figure standing next to DNAmy. It sort of looked like - Monkey Fist.

It was Monkey Fist, standing on two legs this time, towering over her. _His_ face Drakken could read. It had a small, one-side-of-the-mouth smile and a glitter in his eyes that said, _I'm so much smarter than you, and that's why_ I'm _not the one throwing up right now._The prickles started up the back of his neck, because he couldn't think of a way to prove that face wrong.

Even as Drakken watched, Monkey Fist leaned over and whispered something into DNAmy's ear. He'd never noticed her ears before, even during the three hours he'd been in love with her. Shego's ears were pierced but she didn't wear earrings that much, so she had little dents in them. But DNAmy's ears were completely smooth - and so tiny. So not like his. He could feel them getting bigger and floppier the longer he looked at her.

Drakken began to tremble. He had to get out of there, away from Monkey Fist's smirk and DNAmy's perfect ears and Duff Killigan holding his nose and the loud, triumphant laughter of Professor Dementor. Why was he doing that? Didn't he remember they were friends now?

He pushed away from the trashcan and bolted for the stairs. His feet tangled around each other and he bonked his face against a wall. What a stupid place to put a wall. . .

Drakken turned around and immediately fell over a table that wasn't as far away as it looked. It was like random objects in the room had decided to band together and attack him, which he was pretty sure wasn't possible. But, then, the way the room was spinning shouldn't have been possible, either. It was another thing he had to get away from.

He peeled himself off the table, cracking his back in the process, and narrowed his stinging, watering eyes at the stairs. This time - this time he was going to make it to them! Nothing was going to stand in his way! He pounded across the floor, the stairs getting closer and closer with every step he took -

Shego and her faulty clones suddenly flung themselves into his path. "Where do you think you're going?" they asked (all at the same time; he was surprised it wasn't louder).

It took Drakken a minute to remember where he was going. All of his brain cells were working overtime just to keep him upright. "I gotta go home," he was finally able to say. "I'm sick." "Sick" came out "shick," because his tongue wouldn't go where it was supposed to.

Shego rolled her eyes, and her copies duplicated her. . . duplicates copied her. "Yeah, I kinda gathered that when you ralphed in the trashcan."

What was she talking about? That sentence was too long and tangly for him to understand. Drakken felt his face crumple. He tried to take big breaths in, but all he could manage were quick, shallow pants. His lungs were tight and squeezy with panic.

Shego started shaking her head, hard, until he thought it was going to pop off, which would not be good at all. He was pretty sure people couldn't survive without their heads. Now, chickens could live for a couple of hours, and he'd heard cockroaches could last a week or two. He shuddered - he hated cockroaches. Nasty little things with their shiny shells and their six skittery little legs. Could live through anything, like a certain frustrating teen hero. Maybe she was part cockroach. That would explain so much. . .

Things started to go fuzzy around the edges of his brain, blurred thoughts of giant cockroaches with red hair and headless chickens in shirts that showed their belly buttons. Wait, did chickens even _have_belly buttons?

Shego brought Drakken's attention back to her by putting a hand on his arm - gently, at least for Shego. Her hand was steady and sure and not the slightest bit shaky. He wished his could be like that. He wished _anything_on him could be like that. He was so busy wishing his nervous system forgot to flinch away from being touched.

"Look, Doc," Shego said in the voice she usually reserved for when he was running a fever. "It's gonna be okay. I'll getcha home safe. And then," she added under her breath, "I'll skin you alive."

Drakken wasn't sure what that last part meant, but it didn't matter. She had just said everything was going to be okay, so he knew it would be. Shego knew these kinds of things. She'd take him home and he'd change into his striped jammies and crawl into bed and pull the covers up to his chin and lay there (lie there?) until he felt better.

Yeah. Those were good thoughts. Drakken broke into a yawn, one so big it brought tears to his eyes. He wished he had that teleporter ray he'd stolen from Dementor, so he could beam himself back into his bed with just the push of a button.

But he didn't, so he couldn't, so he followed Shego up the stairs, which rocked and pitched like they were trying to toss him off. As they made their way across the twirly-swirly lobby, him shivering and clinging to her because he knew he'd fall if he let go, Drakken heard Shego whisper, sounding like she was talking to one of her clones instead of him, "At least it wasn't anything stronger."

_Stronger?_Drakken tried to ponder that, but his head hurt too bad for his brain to come up with much. Wrestlers were stronger than him. The smell of onions was stronger than the smell of cucumbers. Certain chemical compounds were stronger than others, especially if they were poisonous -

Of course! Just like that, Drakken knew what was happening.

He'd been _poisoned_. Some rival mad scientist, obviously envious of Drakken's brilliant mind and extra-high level of evil, had probably decided to "rub him out," the way they said in the old mystery movies that played on TV at 5:00 in the morning. Only this guy apparently wasn't very good with chemicals, so the poison had only been strong enough to make him sick to his stomach. Now that he'd thrown it up and they were leaving HenchCo's spinning basement, he was going to be just fine.

Shego opened the front door and stepped outside. He wasn't sure which door to go out - there were so many! - but he decided he should probably just follow Shego. After all, she didn't seem to have any trouble getting through the door. So he headed out the same one she'd gone through.

Outside, the night air was cool on Drakken's face, and it blew away some of the nausea. He was able to breathe in deep and let it out slowly through his nose and feel a little bit better.

He was also able to lift his head and see a round, bluish blur that he guessed was his hovercraft at the end of the driveway. He couldn't calculate its exact distance from him, because his depth perception was all off, and he didn't remember the algebraic formula for figuring distance - and he must be sick to forget _that_. But it didn't look very far away. He could probably reach it in forty steps. Twenty if he took extra-big jumps, but his legs were too shaky for that.

Drakken glanced down at his feet in their special mad-scientist black boots, size six. They were jittery and nervous, and the sidewalk wouldn't stay still either. Stupid thing kept jumping from side to side just like the stairs had - and the booths - and the trashcans. He really was going to have to write a very angry letter to Hench tomorrow. Provided he survived the night. . .

No, no. Drakken hauled in more breaths and focused on his feet. He would be all right. He just had to walk forty steps to his hovercraft and then he could go back to his lair. It never swirled around in circles, so he would be safe there.

Okay. Forty. That wasn't a very big number. One step for each year of his life. He'd lived forty years, he could walk forty steps.

Drakken grabbed onto Shego's arm again for balance, wobbled a little, and then slowly, shakily put his left foot in front of his right foot. The sidewalk jumped and spun, but Shego's arm stayed firm. It wouldn't let him fall. He raised his right foot in front of his left and put it down. There. That was one step. _Just thirty-nine more to go._

Left foot up, left foot down. Right foot up, right foot down._ Thirty-eight more steps to go._ Left foot, right foot. _Thirty-seven more steps._ Left, right. _Thirty-six._ Left, trip, stumble, catch Shego's hand, struggle back up, right. _Thirty-five -_

"Oh, great."

Shego's voice made him jerk his head up - and hoo-boy, did that make him dizzy. Coming up the sidewalk were the last two people he wanted to see right now. Well, actually, more like the second-to-last. The first-to-last would be Ron Stoppable and his friend - that redheaded girl - what was her name?

These two weren't _that_bad. At least they probably wouldn't kick him in painful places and drag him off to jail. Not that he'd even done anything illegal today. . .

No, no pesky teen heroes or unnaturally intelligent hairless rodents. Just the Seniors, arriving fashionably late, while he was leaving _un_fashionably early - and unfashionably sick. Was it even possible to be fashionably sick? Drakken didn't think so.

Junior hurried toward them, and he didn't seem to notice Drakken at all. He was gazing at Shego with awestruck eyes and a mushy mouth, like the rest of the world didn't exist because he was so madly in love with her. That made Drakken's insides swirl into a protective knot. The kid seemed nice enough, but you just never knew. His cousin Eddy was usually nice enough, too, but around girls he always got all weird and creepy.

It was Senior, though, that made Drakken feel like he was growing large enough for everyone within a 12-mile radius to stare at and shrinking down to nothing at the same time. He was following behind Junior, as usual, leaning slightly on his cane, also as usual. Anyone else would look old and feeble with a cane, but Senior pulled it off. Even if his pants had fallen down and left him standing in his boxer shorts in front of a jail cell full of his arch-enemies, the way Drakken's had just last week, Senior probably still would have been able to seem so distinguished and in-control.

Drakken moaned under his breath, stomach flopping again. Why did the most dignified person in the world have to show up when he was currently being the _least_?

But even though Senior had so much money and such good manners, he had never looked down on Drakken, the way villains who were richer and classier than him usually did. He'd always been respectful, and Drakken wasn't used to being respected.

"Shego?" Junior whined sadly. "You are leaving?" He looked like someone had just foiled one of his greatest, most foolproof schemes. Drakken remembered that feeling from last week, too. It hadn't been a very good week.

"Is everything all right?" That was Senior's voice. He liked Senior's voice. It sounded crispy and crackly, old and wise, like he'd learned everything there was to know - things even evil geniuses didn't have figured out at almost forty-one. There was something comforting about that - so comforting it took Drakken a moment to realize Senior was asking if something was wrong.

And he wasn't talking to Shego. His pale-blue eyes, the same color as Drakken's skin, were looking right at him.

Drakken jerked his head away before they could make eye contact and fastened his gaze on the fidgety sidewalk. _Please_, he commanded Senior mentally, _think I'm clueless or sick or even rude. Just don't see that I can't walk straight._

There was something about the dizziness and the ground wobbling under him - something worse than embarrassing - something that weighed heavy on his shoulders and made it physically impossible to lift his head. And he didn't want to watch the respect disappear from Senior's eyes.

Drakken felt a weird tingling at the tip of his nose and the backs of his eyes. Must have been another effect of the poison. He pressed his lips together and tried to swallow away the barfy taste in his mouth. He knew if there was poison left in his stomach, his body needed to get rid of it. But he really, _really_didn't want to throw up again.

He could hear Shego's voice, sounding like she was miles away, which he knew she couldn't be because her arm was around his shoulders - unless that was one of her clones holding him and the real Shego was far away. Or maybe the real Shego was right here, and her clone was the one talking from a distance. Anyway, he could hear one of the Shegos muttering something to the Seniors. Probably telling them her boss had been poisoned and that she needed to get him home A.S.A.P., which was teen slang for "as soon as possible," so they could work on an antidote.

A little tiny bit of hope stirred in Drakken's heart. Senior was pretty smart, and he'd lived a long time - maybe he knew what kind of poison this was, how to treat it or at least diminish its effects. He opened his mouth to ask him and then stopped. His tongue was still swollen and clumsy, and it wasn't listening to him very well, so all his words came out in a sloppy, slurred way. He wouldn't have been able to stand letting Senior hear that. He would just have to hope that that was what Shego was asking about.

Senior said something then, but Drakken didn't hear what. His ears were starting to ring - a loud, shrill noise that sounded like he'd implanted a phone in his brain. All he could make out was the vague, polite murmur of Senior's voice. He tilted his head to one side so he could see better and saw Junior cocking his own head in confusion.

Hmmm. No clues there. Senior was _always_ polite, and Junior was _always_confused. His poisoning didn't seem to be affecting them.

But how could it not? It didn't make sense. How could the world keep going like nothing was wrong when its future ruler was so miserable? For a terrible, lonely second, Drakken felt small and insignificant, like a burnt-out bulb on the Christmas tree of life. . .

And why did he keep thinking about Christmas? It wouldn't be Christmas for months and months. That didn't make sense, either.

Before Drakken could figure any of it out, though, Shego's arm tightened around his shoulders and she stepped forward, pulling him with her. With her helping him, he managed to walk, on shaky legs, the remaining thirty-five steps to the hovercraft.

Make that hovercraft_s_. He was seeing six, and he knew he wouldn't be able to pilot any of them.

Drakken patted his lab coat from collar to. . . whatever the bottom of a lab coat was called. A hem? No, that sounded too girly - it was probably meant to describe dresses or ruffly shirts or something. . . why was he thinking about this? He needed to find his keys and give them to Shego - so she could get them home - they were in his pocket - but where was his pocket?

"You're gonna hafta drive," he informed Shego. His tongue tripped over his teeth, and drool slid down his chin. He hoped Senior couldn't see him anymore. Senior had probably never drooled in his life - or thrown up - at least, not in _front_of anyone.

"Yes. Thank you." Shego's words sounded short and annoyed as she reached into his pocket - oh, _there_it was, right below the waist - and pulled out his keys. She shook them in his face. They made a nice jangly sound. Ooh, the ground was slanting forward again.

Shego reached up a hand and caught his arm before he could fall over. "Just sit back and relax, okay?" Her voice was quiet and gentle - well, quiet and gentle for Shego.

Drakken knew he was staring. Just gaping, like she'd grown an extra nose, which he knew wasn't very polite (staring, not sprouting extra olfactory organs). Shego was rubbing his back, which was sort of comforting, even though the blades in her gloves poked him. She would drive him home and tuck his blankets up under his chin and call Poison Control if she needed to.

Drakken felt his legs start to shake with relief. It would be all right. He didn't need to worry. Shego would make sure everything was okay, because she really _cared_about him. The thought was so moving, his tears welled up with eyes. . . eyes welled up with tears.

"You're so nice, Shego!" he hollered, not caring who heard him. The whole _world_should know what a wonderful sidekick he had. "I love you! I hope we'll always be friends."

He glanced down at the hovercraft - the work of his brilliant mind, one of his first evil inventions - and felt his tears start to spill over. "I love the hovercraft, too," he sputtered around the lump in his throat.

It was Shego's turn to gape, like he'd just said something stupid. Which he hadn't. He couldn't really remember what it was he had just said, but he knew it wasn't anything stupid, because he was a genius and. . .

"Yeah, uh-huh. That's real nice, Doc," she finally said. She swung herself into the driver's seat of the hovercraft and turned the key in the ignition. Its engine whooshed, the taillights flickered on, and Drakken was able to smile for the first time in what seemed like years. He couldn't think of any sound better than one of the machines he'd invented all by himself working right. Stealing other scientists' inventions was fun - not to mention very evil - but it didn't give him that sense of pride that made him feel all shiny and took away the itch in his chest.

It was a good enough feeling to let him put his hands on the sides of the hovercraft and hop into the passenger seat. His ankle smacked the door as he did, and Drakken let out a yelp before he could stop himself. That wasn't very villainous, but it _hurt_, and he didn't need a broken ankle on top of his broken head and stomach. Well, technically, his ankle was _below_his head and stomach. Wasn't it? His brain was in such a mushy tangle, he was forgetting basic anatomy.

He wiggled himself back into his seat - Hench must have done something to it, because it bounced back and forth, too - leaned back, folded his hands over his unhappy tummy, and closed his eyes. Glowing microscopic organisms danced behind his eyelids. Breathing came a little easier.

Drakken heard Shego yank the steering mechanism up - it always squeaked when you tugged it like that. The hovercraft rose off the ground and started to zoom through the air, like a seat on an amusement park ride. He lifted his arms in the air to create the perfect aerodynamics - because you _had_to do that if you wanted to obtain Maximum Ride Enjoyment. "Whee!" he shouted as the wind whooshed between his arms and lifted his ponytail off the back of his sweaty neck.

Shego didn't seem to be having fun, though. When he opened his eyes a crack to peek at her, she had her teeth clenched down tight. He could tell because she had her lips pulled back away from them, like she was going to bite him.

Drakken squirmed away from her and curled his fingers over the side of the hovercraft. Even scarier, she'd taken one hand off the controls and was making it glow its green plasma right next to his face.

"Look, Dr. D," Shego hissed. She sounded like an angry cat - and not the kind that Commodore Puddles chased. More like a jaguar or a lion. "I'd like to think that, given the circumstances, I've been _extremely_patient up 'till now. But even I can only take so much. I need you to -" her eyes flashed, and she held her hand even closer - 'ZIP IT!"

Drakken watched her lips stretch back and purse together and poke out around those words. Big words. Long sentences. He was too tired to understand.

But those last two words were nice and little (well, maybe just little), so he got them loud and clear. She was telling him to be quiet and leave her alone. What happened to looking out for him? Couldn't she see that he was terribly sick and needed her help?

The itch in Drakken's chest was replaced by an angry burn, and he had to stick his tongue out at Shego before he exploded. There! That ought to show her!

Shego rolled her eyes and groaned, but she didn't look the least bit insulted like she was supposed to. Just annoyed. He jerked his head around so he wouldn't have to watch her smirk. He'd seen enough of those mean little non-smiles tonight already.

By now, Drakken had the hiccups again; worst case he'd ever had. They came one right after the other, barely giving him time to breathe in between them, and they were so big and hard they made his diaphragm ache.

He raised his head and studied the sky. Looking at the stars usually made him feel better. Watching them twinkle. Connecting them into constellations. Finding the ones he knew by name. Sometimes he was even able to spot Venus - so shiny - or Mars - little and red - and that always cheered him up.

But tonight the stars were dark and swirly, like the toilets bullies used to stick his head in back in middle school. Like black holes that wanted to gobble him up and spit out his bones - no, they wouldn't even do that. Once something went into a black hole, it would never come back out. _Ever_.

Funny. He hadn't thought there were any black holes close enough to Earth to be seen with the naked eye. As if HenchCo's basement wasn't bad enough, now something was wrong with the entire _galaxy_. And that didn't make sense. Jack Hench could have spun his building around as a stupid promotional. . . thingy, but he wasn't in control of the Milky Way.

Drakken shivered. _Was_he?

He glanced up at the sky again to see if the black holes were still there. They were, and for half a second he wished they would open up and spit out his mother, so she'd land right next to him in the hovercraft. He even scooted over in his seat to give her room - not that she needed a lot of space, since she was such a little person.

But whenever he'd gotten sick as a kid, she'd seemed like the biggest, strongest person around. She'd wiped his face with a wet washcloth and murmured to him. Her voice was loud and shrill, like Dementor's, but somehow it was soothing. Sometimes she would sing to him. Her favorite song went something like, "It isn't any trouble just to smile, smile, smile," only instead of saying the word "smile," she'd spell it. When he was super-little, he hadn't even known what she'd been spelling, but he'd liked the song anyway.

Drakken gulped at the lump in his throat. He wasn't sure if it was tears or vomit, and he didn't want to let either of them out. His mother shouldn't see him like this, running into walls and tripping over table and slurring his words, any more than Senior should. He would die a slow, miserable death of embarrassment. It made his stomach feel icky.

That, and the fact that the hovercraft seemed to be going faster and faster. It didn't remind him of a fun amusement park ride anymore. Now it was more like one of them that went at double the speed of light (which shouldn't have even been possible) and flipped you upside-down, the ones he couldn't go on without -

_No, no, no, Drakken._ He tried to shake his head, but it was too sore to move. _Stop thinking like that. You'll probably feel better if you just don't think about it._

Drakken sucked in air through his nose with a wheeze and let it out through his mouth with a hiccup. Gulped down the lump again. Pulled his legs up in front of him on the seat. Tried to rest his head on his knees, but they were too bony and knobby to be comfortable. (Curse that metabolism Mother always envied.)

Instead, he hugged his knees to his torso. That felt a little better, a little safer. Slowly, slowly, he began to rock back and forth, back and forth, the way he used to do in the old rocking chair Mother kept in the attic. His back creaked just like it did, too. He really needed to go see a chiropractor, but his budget was so tight right now. . .

The rocking helped, though. It distracted his body from his achy back and queasy stomach and itchy chest.

But it didn't distract his _mind_. His brain felt soggy and sloshy, like it was full of punch. Drakken tipped his head to the side to see if it would drain out. It didn't. He'd read about water-on-the-brain in one of his science manuals, but not fruit-punch-on-the-brain. He had no idea what to do, how to make it better. It was almost starting to scare him. And Dr. Drakken did not like being scared.

The true villain didn't know fear, _Villains_magazine always said. If they did, they'd never conquer - what was it he wanted to conquer again? He should have known, but it was stuck somewhere in the soppiness of his brain.

Drakken ran his thick tongue over his lips. They were so dry they cracked, and he tasted a bit of blood. He shuddered even though villains weren't supposed to.

Maybe - maybe if he sang to himself like his mother used to sing to him - maybe that would calm him down enough that he could be scary instead of scared. Yeah. He licked his lips again and nodded, remembering too late how bad his head hurt. It was definitely worth a try.

Drakken opened his mouth and closed his eyes to remember how to form his lips around words. "It ishn't any trouble," he began cautiously, "jusht to S-"

Doodles. What letter came next? "R"? "J"? "E"? He knew there was an "E" in there somewhere. He tried to mentally run through the alphabet, but that only made things worse. There were so many letters, and they were all turning upside-down and sideways in his brain.

Drakken frowned to himself. Probably better just to stick with "S" for now.

Wrapping his arms tighter around his knees, he began again. "It isn't any trouble just to S-S-S-S-S."

His voice didn't sound anything like his mother's - it was much deeper and not nearly as sweet - and his mouth couldn't pronounce all of the words correctly - his "S"s sounded like "esh"es. And he could hear Shego moaning next to him, like she thought he was being dumb.

But none of that mattered. He rocked and singed (sanged? sunged?) the rest of the way home.

()()()

_Total d'oh moment: I've never watched The Andy Griffith Show and I forgot that the drunk was Otis Campbell, not Barney Fife. It's been fixed. Apologies to any readers who wondered what the ding-dong I was talking about. :)_


	4. Chapter 4

**Finally finished Chapter Four!**

"Okay. Woo." Shego locked the lair's front door behind her, leaned against it, and sighed, loud and long, like _she_ was the one whose body was doing everything she didn't want it to and nothing it was supposed to. And whose brain was snarled up into a knot she couldn't possibly untangle. And who had just made a fool of herself in front of her best friends _and_ her worst enemies. And who needed to stop thinking about this, right now, because she was breaking out in a sticky sweat that formed little bubbles on her upper lip, and she was pretty sure supervillains weren't supposed to do that, either.

Drakken heaved a sigh of his own and hiccuped again, feeling his Adam's apple bob in his throat. So far, getting home didn't seem to have done much good. The lair was whirling around and around, just like HenchCo's basement - and the sidewalk - and the stars. He shuddered, and goosebumps prickled up his arms.

Drakken bent at the waist, trying to stop the gross churny feeling in his stomach. From this angle, he could see Shego better, and he tried to read her face. That was hard enough when his vision wasn't blurred and wobbly. Shego could make her face so blank sometimes, with no expression at all, which was kind of creepy. Made him a little jealous, actually - he could never make his own face look that smooth and cool, no matter how long he practiced in front of the mirror.

Shego's eyes met his, and she smiled a not-really-happy smile. It was almost as scary as the blank face. "Are we having fun yet?" she asked in that dry, sarcastic way she was good at.

Drakken opened his mouth to laugh - Shego could be pretty funny when it wasn't _him_ she was mocking - but a strangled-sounding wail came out instead. Supervillains _definitely_ weren't supposed to do that.

He clapped a hand over the general area of his oral cavity and looked around like he was wondering where the noise had come from. Maybe if he did that, Shego wouldn't know it had been him. Maybe she'd think it was Commodore Puddles. It sort of sounded like Commodore Puddles. . .

The room swayed - or was that him? Drakken couldn't tell. Weak in the knee region, he sagged back against the door, like Shego, and let himself slide down its length to the floor. His legs felt like sacks of wet oatmeal.

Ugh. Shouldn't have thought about food. "Shego," he hissed, swiping his hands through the air, clawing at nothing, for reasons he couldn't figure out. "I - I - I - I -"

Where were the right words? The only ones he could find were, "I need the bathroom."

Shego's eyes enlargened - widefied - whatever - they got bigger, and she reached over and grabbed his arm. Her grip was firm and hard - and tight, like a pair of handcuffs. His nerves freaked out and he jolted away from her, not understanding why.

And then, suddenly, he _did_ understand, because he knew two things very clearly - well, as clearly as he could know anything right now. He hadn't expelled all the poison from his body, and he needed to get to a sink. _Now_.

Drakken tore down the hall, and a wall jumped directly into his path out of nowhere, for the second time tonight. Just like before, he wasn't able to dodge soon enough, and he crashed straight into it, face first. The pain receptors in his nose all woke up and started screaming.

Drakken spat out a swear word, surprising himself. He didn't usually talk like that. With his luck, his mother would probably hear him from all the way back in - what was that town called? - Middleton, and run across the ocean just to wash his mouth out.

He had a mental image of himself with his mouth full of soap, bubbling and foaming like he was a mad _dog_ instead of a mad scientist. His stomach churned dangerously, and he pulled away from the wall and bolted to the bathroom door.

Three knobs stared back at him - well, they didn't really _stare_, because they didn't have eyes. Drakken pressed his lips together against his growing queasiness as he studied them. Let's see, Shego kept using the middle knobs, so they must work best. He grabbed the middle knob, felt its cool, solid, I-am-really-here weight against his gloved palm, and pulled with all his supervillain might.

Nothing. He squeezed his eyes shut so the turvy-topsy walls wouldn't distract him and yanked again. Still nothing. He wrenched, he tugged, he grunted and seethed and strained until he heard something pop, but the knob wouldn't budge.

Drakken opened his eyes to make sure he was holding the right one, but he couldn't see anything. The world was one big, cloudy smear, like he'd forgotten to to put in his contacts that morning. But he had had - he remembered it, because the right one had taken six blinks to focus, and that was a lot. Ooh - the poison was taking its toll, which was okay, since he was about to get rid of it, but he'd really prefer to do that in the sink. . .

"It swings _in_," said a disembodied, disdainful female voice from somewhere in the blur.

Oh. Right. Drakken blinked down at what he hoped was the knob, twisted his wrist, and pushed. The door popped open, which meant it wasn't there anymore to support the weight he hadn't realized he was leaning on it.

He stumbled into the bathroom, falling over his stupid feet in the process. Flailing his arms wildly, he managed to keep from falling on his sore face - or, worse, his churning stomach. He wound up lurching past the sink, but that was all right. He was sure his legs wouldn't be able to hold him much longer, and he had to stand up to reach the sink.

Okay. New plan. He dropped to his knees, slid across the floor to the toilet, flung open the lid, and retched.

()()()()()()

_Don't let me die._ Drakken rested his head on the toilet seat, its porcelain ice-cold against his damp cheek, and shook. _Please, if anyone up there is listening, don't let me die._

He raised his head and squinted down at the toilet bowl, at the new water flowing in. It was as wobbly and shaky as he felt inside - and as blurry as everything else.

Why was his vision doing that? Was it an effect of the poison? Drakken didn't know - he'd never been poisoned before, unless you counted that one time at that quaint little Mexican restaurant, the one he could actually afford to eat at. (Turned out the food had been super-cheap for a reason.) But that had been food poisoning, not poisoning-poisoning. A little freaky, but not nearly as scary as this.

Drakken shivered and broke out in perspiration across his forehead and wriggled around in his lab coat to warm up. Or cool down. He wasn't sure which.

He also wasn't sure - never had been - why people said warm _up_ and cool _down_. Was it because both sets of words were opposite? Was it because heat rose? Or was it just that way to confuse evil geniuses, to make them doubt their brilliance since they didn't understand it? Maybe it was all a massive good-guy conspiracy, thought up by that irritating adolescent cheerleader -

Drakken stopped and shook his head at himself, watching his crinkly reflection's head sway back and forth, too. He was too sleepy to ponder that right now. Much too sleepy - and very much too sick. He was so hot sweat dribbled down his forehead and plopped off his chin into the toilet, but so cold his teeth were chattering. He hadn't felt that way since the last time he'd had the flu.

Yeah. The flu. He let out a big breath, tried to calm down. Flu made you throw up and sweat and chatter your teeth and sometimes even made the room spin around you and he needed to stop thinking about it right now or he'd throw up again, and he couldn't do that. His throat already felt scraped-up and sore.

But there was a terrible feeling deep inside him that the flu had never caused. It was the sensation that _he_ was spinning, worse than the room, going faster and faster until he drilled straight through the floor and fell into another world he couldn't escape from. There was _nothing_ he could do, because his body had stopped listening to his commands. Drakken felt helpless and completely out of control.

He needed to get back to his room. Back to his bed, where he could bury his face in his pillow and pull the covers over his head and stay there until he felt like a supervillain again, instead of a scared little boy trying not to cry. It made him want to curl his lip at himself, the way everyone else already had.

Drakken put his hands on either side of the toilet seat and pushed himself to his feet. The room teeter-tottered, and a dizzy, too-warm wave of nausea washed over him. He bent back over the toilet, but his belly was so empty nothing came up except pain and a horrible wheezing sound.

He let his grip on the toilet loosen, sank to the floor, and slammed his eyes shut. The convulsions in his throat stopped, and he could breathe again.

_That's right, Drakken. Just breathe._

Drakken curled over himself, trying to fold into a tiny ball the way Commodore Puddles did when he slept under his bed. Maybe that would make the shaky, shivery, spinny sense stop. Whoa - he just thought a lot of words that started with the letter "S." That should have been funny, but it wasn't.

It didn't matter, either. No matter how tight he squeezed himself up, how hard he hugged his legs and nuzzled his chin to his chest, the bathroom was still spinning. He couldn't see it anymore, but he could _feel_ it, and that was one-thousand-and-twelve times worse.

He tried to lick at his lips, but his tongue was too rough and dry. He had to get to his room, where it was safe and the walls were stationary, and the bed was soft. . .

Drakken struggled to his feet again, with the same results. The unproductive heaves were worse than actually puking. It made him so angry he wanted to rip the toilet out of the floor and throw it through the wall. But he was too weak, and that made him even madder.

He lowered himself to the floor, turned over onto his stomach and pounded the ground with his fists, kicked at it with his feet, and shrieked until his voice was so hoarse he could barely hear himself. Sometimes that was the only way to get rid of the frustration that threatened to split his chest in two.

Finally, when his fists ached from being smashed into the floor and his legs hurt from kicking so hard, Drakken raised his head and peered through bleary eyes at the bathroom door. It was hanging slightly open in that way that drove him crazy, and it only looked a few feet away, but those feet might as well have been miles. Standing up was obviously out of the question, let alone putting one foot in front of the other. He was stuck - and he was going to die right here on this hard bathroom floor - and he really didn't want to die next to a toilet -

_Calm drak, Downkin_, his panicked brain commanded him. _There are other ways to move besides walking. There have to be - you didn't walk until you were about a year old. How did you get around before that?_

Well, let's see. Drakken looked down at his hand and let it unfold from its angry little fist. Mother had carried him a lot. That wasn't going to work, because she wasn't here (and because he was nearly a foot taller than her). But the rest of the time, he had -

Crawled!

Drakken felt his lips trembling up into a smile. He could do that! He was already basically on his hands and knees. All he had to do was pull himself to the door, and then Shego would help him back to his bedroom.

Gulping at the lump in his throat, he started to scramble toward the door. But the slick fabric of his lab coat, made even slipperier with sweat - like, how could sweat be sticky _and_ slippery at the same time? - slid out from under him, and he landed on the ground, belly first. He gasped out loud at how bad it hurt.

Drakken fought back the lump again and gazed at the door, which seemed so very far away. That should have worked. Of course, lots of things that should have worked tonight hadn't. Like his stomach and his legs, and several lobes of his brain.

_Okay, okay._ He breathed in a ragged breath through his nose. If he couldn't crawl on all fours like a baby, maybe he could slither on his belly like a snake. That would be easier - and better for his villainous reputation, to boot. Snakes were much more menacing that babies. _He_ wasn't scared of snakes, but lots of other people were.

Drakken grasped at the floor, trying to sink his nails in the linoleum. The tiles were cold under his shaking fingers - all twenty of them. And so smooth. Why hadn't they ever gotten a rug for the bathroom? "Too villainous," he'd said. Or was it not villainous enough?

Whatever. Drakken stretched his arms as far as they would reach and grabbed the floor again. His fingers were still trembling, but the ground didn't try to shake them off. It stayed still and safe.

He extended his neck until his head was even with his hands, then pulled his chest and torso after it. Slowly, carefully, he slid his hips forward. "Nonexistent hips," Shego had called them last week, when he'd lost his cowboy pants and had to wear that significantly less stylish barrel. But they existed, he knew. They had to exist, because he was moving them forward, and they were jittering as badly as everything else on him.

Last of all, he managed to drag his rubbery legs and almost-numb feet forward. There. He'd moved his whole body. The door was a little bit closer.

_Good job, Drakken. Now you just have to do it again_, his brain told him. At least, he was _pretty_ sure that was what it had said. His thoughts were as scrambled and slurry as his speech.

_Again?_ his muscles yelped back. _You've got to be kidding; we're dyin' here!_

_Come on. Just one or two more times,_ said some other part of his body - he was too tired and dizzy to figure out which one. _You can do it._

Drakken found enough stubborn determination to set his jaw. Yeah. He _could_ do it. He was a feared mad scientist, a man in the prime of his life. He extended his arms again and groaned as his back crackled in protest.

Well, okay. Maybe a _little_ past his prime.

He used his arms to scoot himself forward, first head, then neck, then chest, then stomach, then hips, then legs and feet. Then paused to rest. Let his head fall to the floor, squishing his cheek up and making it even harder to see. Panted for breath. Listened to the sound of the toilet gurgling in time with his stomach.

Drakken repeated the process of dragging himself by the arms until his hands were touching a different floor. This one was deep, dark red instead of tan, and smooth and flat rather than broken up into lots of little square tiles.

He felt his face break into a wobbly smile. It was the hallway! He'd made it!

Drakken flopped over onto his left side, innards sloshing, and grabbed the doorframe. Digging his fingers in as far as they would go, he struggled to his knees. The room quivered a bit, but not enough to make him fall.

Feeling a bit braver, he moved his grasp higher up and managed to get to his feet. He'd done it! He was upright!

Grinning triumphantly, Drakken let go of the doorframe. _That_ was when the ground shifted forward and took him with it. Small, strong arms caught him for about the sixteenth time tonight.

He glanced down into a pale green blur that he guessed was Shego's face, closed his eyes, and held his breath, waiting for the perfectly chosen smart remark that would be just sharp enough to shatter his ego into millions of tiny pieces. As if it wasn't in ruins already.

But all he heard was "Dr. D?", like she wasn't sure that who he was at all. There was disgust in her voice, just like he knew there would be - but maybe something else was there, too. Maybe worry?

The terror in his chest thickened. If _Shego_ was worried, something horribly bad must have been happening.

And it was. Something blinked in Drakken's brain then, clear and bright, just for a minute before it disappeared back into the murkiness - his head felt like it was full of ball bearings, heavy and metallic and weighing him down. But it was long enough for him to know something for sure, ninety-nine-point-nine-perfect, theory-changing-to-scientific-law sure.

It wasn't the floor that was tilting at obtuse angles and whirling in circles. It was _him_.

Drakken's mouth dried out. "Shego -" for the first time, he noticed he was pronouncing it "Suhego," and that frightened him - "what'sh wrong wif' me?"

Shego let out an I-can't-believe-you-just-said-that noise. "I told you before." Her voice was flat and cold again, which was sort of reassuring. That, at least, he was used to. "You. Are. Drunk."

Forget reassuring. The words hit him like one of those sassy cheerleader's kicks to the gut.

Drakken staggered backward, mind reeling. Him, the great and mighty Dr. Drakken, soon to be ruler of the world, drunk like some common thug? It couldn't be.

But then - there was the way the room spun. Not being able to walk without stumbling or talk without slurring. The way he couldn't think a clear thought, despite how hard he was trying. The throwing up. The randomly generated emotions. Being drunk _made sense_.

Except for one thing - one very important thing. He hadn't consumed any alcohol, and that was sort of required in order to get drunk. Could the punch have gone bad _after_ he drank it? Were conditions in the human stomach suitable for fermentation? He should have known that, but he didn't. . . because he was drunk, even though he wasn't supposed to be, and he really didn't want to be.

Drakken took another step back and bumped into the doorframe. He shook his head, back and forth, back and forth. The ball bearings jostled around, clacking into each other, making his head hurt even worse. No matter how hard he wagged it, though, he couldn't shake out the memories flashing in his mind. Memories of things he'd seen on TV.

Men in westerns staggering out of saloons and puking in the street. People being dragged off to jail in handcuffs for driving drunk - "under the influence," they called in on cop shows. Someone who_ wasn't_ arrested in time crashing his car and killing six people.

A guy with one of those stubbly beards that every other adult male got if he didn't shave for three days, wearing a dirty undershirt and boxer shorts, slouched in a fold-up chair on his porch, a can of beer in his hand. Some lady - his wife? - stood over him, hands on her hips. A glare on her face. Obviously chewing him out. "You worthless drunk," she spat.

_Worthless drunk._

_Those_ words hit harder than any kick, even one in the face. He burst into tears, and not reflex ones. Horrible, whimpery, nose running sobs that, all things considered, he had every right to cry.

Shego made another disdainful sound, down lose in her throat. Before Drakken could even start to go prickly, she reached up and draped his arm around her shoulders, using her body to help prop up his. With steady, sure steps, she led him down the hallway, up a flight of stairs, around the shark tanks, past the torture chamber stocked with brain-tapping devices and DVDs of the worst in preschool television. The leaky kitchens sink mocked him, each drop seeming to say, "Drunk. Drunk. Drunk. You're drunk, drunk, drunk."

Finally, they reached his bedroom door. He recognized the the large black-with-white-letters "Keep Out!" sign, the only thing he'd been able to afford to buy from Jack Hench, that he'd put up to make entering his room more ominous. And the deep gashes in the wood, nicks he carved himself with the Feline Hypnotism Blade-Cutter-Thing to make it even _more_ ominous. Everyone knew that a scarred-up door was undeniably villainous.

His hand traced the familiar, rough pattern under his eye, the way it always did when he thought of that blade. Fortunately, so was a scarred-up face.

Not that he felt particularly villainous at the moment. Good grief, how lame must he look, drippy-eyed and runny-nosed, leaning on his _sidekick_ for support? Worse than embarrassed again, Drakken wrenched out of Shego's grasp. Drunk or not, he still had _some_ dignity to maintain.

He took two steps, tripped over nothing, and stumbled, bonking against the half-open door and knocking it all the way open. With a thump, he landed on a very large, very flat surface that he guessed was his bed.

So much for dignity.

But the bed felt good, better than anything had all evening. It was so soft, and it sagged under his achy body in just the right way. Drakken felt himself sagging with it.

Grunting, he scooched himself forward with his elbows until his head bumped his pillow. His wonderful giant red pillow. Relief washed over him as he buried his face into the pillow and inhaled his own smell - a blend of chemicals from working in the lab, apple-scented shampoo from the shower he took yesterday, a little bit of sweat from the dreams that had had him tossing and turning all night.

_Drunk_. How could he possibly be drunk? And how did he get undrunk?

Drakken lifted his head, felt a shallow breath shudder through his lungs, watched a tear plop down onto the pillow, right next to his nose. Another dizzy spell came over him, and he squeezed his eyes shut to let it pass.

But it didn't. The bed seemed to flip completely upside-down and he clutched two handfuls of sheet to keep from going with it. The sick feeling clogged his throat again.

Drakken's eyes flew open, and he found himself staring at a green-and-black smudge. Shego. If anyone could fix this, she could. Shego could do just about anything. And, as frustrating as that was sometimes, it was just what he needed right now.

"Shego," he moaned. It came out "Suhego" again, but this time he didn't care. "Make it shtop."

The smudge's black mouth moved like she was saying something. He couldn't hear what. Maybe his ears were drunk, too. . .

Drakken could feel his eyelids drooping lower and lower, darkness taking over his vision. But that was okay. Darkness didn't spin. It was safe. He closed his eyes and let himself fall into it.

()()()()()()()()()

"Dr. D?"

No response.

"Yoo-hoo?" Shego waved her hand in front of her employer's face, even though his eyes were closed. "Yo, chief?"

Still nothing.

Okay, so he'd fallen asleep. Or passed out, depending on how much he'd had to drink.

Not that anyone would _tell_ her that. She'd questioned Duff Killigan, Dementor, and all of Professor D's henchmen, but the responses had all been basically the same.

"I don't know."

"I wasn't keeping track."

"It's not my day to watch him."

No, it was _her_ day. Like always.

If she had to hazard a guess, though, she'd say two, three, maybe four glasses of wine. Enough to knock him for a loop - surprise, surprise, the man couldn't hold his liquor - and upset his stomach, but not enough to require a trip to the ER or anything. And he'd been with-it enough to know he shouldn't drive, which may have been the closest thing to a miracle she'd ever witnessed, and she could tell by the way he wouldn't look Senior in the eye that he was sober enough to be ashamed.

Shego crouched down on her knees and leaned in to study the Doc's motionless form - something he never could have achieved when he was conscious. All right, so he was breathing. His chest was rising and falling in an even rhythm, instead of the hyperventilating he'd been doing earlier, and every time he exhaled, he breathed out the pleasing aroma of alcohol and vomit.

Ugh. Charming. She turned away from him, coughing, and pinched her nose shut.

It looked like Drakken wasn't in any immediate danger. Or wouldn't be until morning, when she would yank his ponytail out by the roots for what he'd put her through tonight.

Satisfied by the mental image of herself snatching Drakken half-bald, Shego stomped out of his room and let the door slam slap shut behind her. Honestly - she warns him not to stuff himself this year, and what happens? He goes and gets drunk instead!

The more she thought about it, the madder she got. For two whole weeks, she'd been looking forward to spending an evening socializing with her fellow bad girls instead of baby-sitting Drakken. Which she had _every right_ to do, no matter how lonely he got without her.

He'd never admit it, because it wasn't menacing to manly or any of the other things he was trying, pathetically, to be. But Dr. D did not have a good poker face - or, heck, even a good Go Fish face. The way everything on him drooped when she walked away from him said it all. He looked like a puppy someone had dumped on the side of the road.

So he'd been lonely - no one ever wanted to hang out with him, for some _bizarre_ reason. Worried about not fitting in. Thought a little liquid courage would help him loosen up, only he'd had a little more than a little and was either too stupid or too wasted to know he was being laughed at.

Shego activated her plasma glow and only by grinding her teeth together did she keep from flinging it at the wall. And just when she'd finally gotten into a semi-intelligent conversation about how hard it was to be taken seriously as a villainess. Some chick named Adrena-Lynn had said that no matter what she did, all the male evildoers seemed to see her as just another pretty face. Shego could sympathize with that - happened all the time when her evil careers first started - but this gal didn't even have superpowers to back her up, and her fighting skills were mediocre at best.

Still, she'd managed to stick Kim Possible's dopey sidekick and a random classmate of hers in separate death traps simultaneously, so Kimmie should have had to choose who she wanted to save. Now _that_ was twisted, especially considering the thick layer of eye shadow and inch of mascara couldn't hide the fact that Adrena-Lynn was even younger than she was. Couldn't have been over twenty. Shego kinda liked the kid, even if she was almost as obnoxious with her constant use of the word "freaky" as Drakken's Neanderthal cousin was with his "seriously"s.

She'd been about to say that was one of the things she'd always appreciated about Dr. D - that he'd never treated her differently because of her looks - when loud laughter had roared from the back of the room. The kind that said, _We're making mincement out of someone and enjoying every minute of it._

Above it all, she could hear Drakken, but it wasn't his ripping-somebody-apart laugh. It was his usual delighted chortle, only louder than it should have been, even for him. Thick with something that swirled her stomach into a sickening knot, that told her something was very wrong.

And all kind thoughts about him had disappeared from her mind.

Shego had followed the sound of the laughter, fully intending to tell them to lay off and then go back to her life. No doubt they had double-dog-dared Drakken to lick a doom ray or told him that if he kissed his elbow, he would immediately become the undisputed king of the world.

But Drakken had swayed when he turned toward her, slurred when he greeted her, and her plans for the evening had gone down the toilet. Literally.

She threw open the door to the guest bedroom down the hall from Drakken's and banged it closed. She crossed to the bed and parked herself on the very edge of it, resentment stabbing at her. She hated spending the night at his lair, but she wanted to still have a job come morning. And to do that, she needed to still have a boss come morning. And to do _that_, she needed to make sure he wasn't going to wake up in two hours and take a long walk off their short cliff.

Tempting as the idea was.

Besides, sleeping in her clothes, surrounded by laser guns, tornado-in-a-bottle science experiments amped up to the point where they could produce actual cyclones, and all the other comforts was home was nothin' compared to the rest of the crud he'd put her through tonight. Shego flicked off the lights and laid down, her spine so stiff she half-expected to hear it pop and snap the way Drakken's always did.

She'd stalked up to Jack Hench and demanded to know what he was thinking when he'd decided to serve alcohol. He was lucky that Drakken just turned into an even bigger goofball when he was intoxicated, but what if he hadn't? What if he were the type to get angry or violent? What if it had been someone like Dementor, who wouldn't have been a cute little drunk? Really, who wanted to deal with an inebriated supervillain, especially in a building full of annihilation rays and flesh-eating chemicals?

Not to mention, if Adrena-Lynn was as young as she looked, she was legally still a minor. SSJ probably would have been, too, if he was here. Not that she cared, but she'd thought Hench might. He was always covering his butt, making sure not to do anything _technically_ illegal.

"We're terribly sorry for the inconvenience," Hench had replied, oozing like the slime he was. "But we cannot be held legally responsible."

"I don't give a rip about your liability - " she'd started to say, but Hench talked right over her.

"You see, none of the minors present have consumed any alcohol," he went on. "It's up to the mature, sensible adults to make sure they drink responsibly."

The smile he gave her was so condescending, Shego wanted to knock his teeth out. If she hadn't needed to go check on Drakken, she just might have. As it was, she'd snapped back, "_Mature_, _sensible_ adults? Drink _responsibly_? This is _Drakken_ we're talking about about!" She'd tossed her hair and walked away, leaving Hench to reassure himself that none of this was his fault.

Dr. D was still sitting in the same booth he'd been at when she left, but his face had gone from its usual baby-blue to an icky grayish green. Shego had known before he said a word that he was about to hurl. She'd steered him over to a trash can and mentally crossed her fingers that he'd hit it.

For accuracy, she'd give it a B+. Naturally, though, it wasn't good enough for Hench.

"My carpet!" he'd cried. It was the farthest away from the slick, always-in-control salesman tone Shego had ever heard his voice get. "I just had that professionally cleaned!"

She'd turned away from Drakken's gag-fest and looked Hench square in the eye. "We're terribly sorry for the inconvenience," she'd said between her teeth. "But we cannot be held legally responsible."

Thinking about that now made her lips twitch, but only for a moment. As they were leaving, they'd had the good fortune to encounter the Seniors outside. Now, _there_ were two villains she'd actually looked forward to seeing tonight. Senior leaned a little too heavily on that lame Villain Code of Honor, but he could come up with a decent plot when he put his mind to it, and he had a great evil laugh. And talk about classy - especially compared to Little Mr. Burp-in-her-face, Sir Wipe-his-snotty-nose-on-his-sleeve, the King of Forgetting to Put the Toilet Seat Down.

And poor Junior had looked crushed when he saw she was going. She was actually pretty bummed about not getting to hang with him, too. Sure, the kid's evil laugh sounded like Drakken's poodle chasing something in his sleep and he wasn't exactly what you'd call a criminal mastermind, but he _was_ a sweetheart. Actually listened to her and respected her opinion, unlike SOME people she could name. Not the brightest bulb, but had enough brains to question the traditionally evil way of doing things. Willing to learn from his mistakes. There was a lot of untapped potential there. He wasn't hard on the eye, either.

But instead of spending time with them, she'd had to taken her drunken idiot of a boss home and wait outside the bathroom with a magazine while he barfed his brains out again. The thought made _her_ want to vomit.

Shego crossed her legs and stared angrily up at the ceiling. She almost wished Drakken or one of the henchmen would wander in and say something moronic, just so she'd have an excuse to claw his eyeballs out. Otherwise, she might have to start in on her own.

She rolled over onto her right side, then flopped over to her left. Raised her head, smoothed out the creases in her pillow until the thing looked like it had been ironed, and lay back down. Lifted her hair off her neck and wished she had some rollers to keep it up - one of the henchmen must have nudged the thermostat up a few degrees from the biting cold Drakken usually set it at. Pulled the covers up to her chin, then kicked them off.

She felt ridiculous - as ADHD as the Doc. But she could _not_ relax, and it was only partially due to the snorts and puffs and nose-whistles coming from his room.

_Drakken's dead to the world in there, Shego,_ her shoulder devil hissed in her ear. _You could probably go in and draw a mustache on him or something, and he wouldn't even stir._

Only because if she didn't do _something_ soon she would go insane - and because she didn't know where Drakken kept the Sharpies - did she take her shoulder angel's suggestion instead. She hopped out of bed and flipped on the lights, for all the good that did. Dr. D kept all his bulbs extra-dim to give the lair a dark, damp, sinister atmosphere. The freeze-your-tail-off temperature was probably maintained for the same reason. He was weird like that.

Shego retrieved her laptop from the living room, booted it up, and connected to the Internet. Her glove-blades made hollow clacking sounds on the keys, way too loud in the relative stillness of the lair, as she typed a-l-c-o-h-o-l p-o-i-s-o-n-i-n-g into Google's search box. She had to make sure she didn't need to haul Drakken to the hospital - cause wouldn't THAT just be the perfect way to end this fun-filled evening?

Didn't look like it. According to the first site that popped up - and what she remembered Mego telling her in eighth grade - her genius employer had a very mild case, "in which the victim probably does not require medical attention, but should still be kept a close eye on."

Great. _Translation: I get to stay up all night and watch him to see if he remembers to breathe._

"No matter how mild a case is, however," the website went on to warn her, "if the victim is unconscious - "

That was definitely Dr. D.

" - he/she should be turned onto his/her side, so that in the event of vomiting, he/she will not choke." In a strange, detached way, Shego wondered why they had never heard of gender-neutral pronouns.

For the love of Pete - how could he have anything left in him? Plus, she hated how they kept calling Drakken "the victim." That didn't even come _close_ to describing him. Sure, he was drunk, but it was his own stupid fault. It wasn't like anyone had pinned him to the ground and poured the booze down his throat.

Another section of the sight referred to him as "the sufferer." Eh, she'd give 'em that. Clearly the expression "feeling no pain" didn't apply here. She'd seen it in his eyes right before he collapsed into bed: he was miserable.

But victim or sufferer or just plain idiot, Shego headed for his room to roll him over. (She was _so_ getting a raise for this.)

She cracked open Drakken's bedroom door and resisted the urge to clamp her hands over her ears. He definitely hadn't forgotten how to breathe. The dude was still snoring like a chainsaw.

Shego made her way over to the head of his bed, put her hands on his shoulders, and gave his body a heave. Dr. D was a pretty slim guy, and usually it didn't take much of her strength to move him. But tonight he was as heavy and floppy as a wet towel, and she had to strain to roll him on his side.

Drakken finally flopped over and acknowledged the change in position with a particularly loud snore. His feet churned like he was chasing something in his sleep - or _being_ chased, more likely. Shego half expected him to spring out of bed and dart down the hall.

She'd never known the Doc to sleepwalk, but, then, he was just fulla surprises tonight. What if he decided to go for a stroll in the middle of the night and fell down four flights of stairs? Or what if he woke up at 2 AM and was still loopy enough to activate the self-destruct mechanism on one of his nastier machines or chug a beaker of iodine or whatever chemical he was using for his latest wacky experiment because he mistook it for a glass of water? There would go the only halfway decent job she'd ever had.

Shego began to scan the room with her eyes. She figured she'd hear him if he got up. Dr. D was a klutz to start with, and drunk, he practically tripped over his own shadow. Still - better safe than sorry.

Her gaze finally landed on a giant, almost-perfectly-round piece of metal sitting on top of what looked like an enormous tripod. Drakken had used it last month, trying to disrupt the Earth's magnetic field. Since it didn't seem too lethal, she pushed it across the room, with much less effort than it had taken to turn Drakken over, and placed it directly next to the bed.

There. Now he wouldn't be able to get up without letting the whole lair know about it.

Shego let the air hiss out of her chest in a big ol' disgusted huff. Propping her suddenly-exhausted self against the Whatchamahoozit of Doom, she glared down at Drakken's unconscious form.

He was _way_ more trouble than he was worth. And as soon as he woke up tomorrow, she was going to give him a tongue-lashing he'd never forget. Being yelled at with a hangover - it tended to stick with you.

The only reason she hadn't already laid into him was that she was still in shock, a sensation she hadn't thought was even possible for her to experience anymore. Over the years, she'd seen Dr. D gorge himself on sweets, misplace a Doomsday device big enough to be seen from space, get beat up by a naked mole rat, and nearly drown bobbing for apples at the evil family picnic.

But _never_ had she seen him drunk before. Heck, she'd never seen him drink anything stronger than that "cocoa moo" stuff he wouldn't shut up about. For all the worst-case scenarios that had skipped through her mind the minute she heard Professor Dementor's unmistakable cackle across the room, this had NOT been one of them.

Really, why would it be? She'd brought champagne to toast the New Year with once; Drakken had taken a few gulps and promptly spewed it out as if it were rat poison. She couldn't begin to picture him sipping wine with dinner or having a beer while watching football with the guys. And when he was down in the dumps because one of his harebrained schemes had gone haywire, he reached for a box of cookies, not a bottle of liquor.

Even as Shego watched, he whimpered from somewhere deep in his dreams and brought one tiny hand up to paw frantically at the air. His little blue lips were trembling.

_Darn it, Drakken._ She sharpened her glare and set her jaw. _Do NOT make me feel sorry for you._

With that, Shego turned on her heel and very deliberately walked away from him before any infuriating pangs of sympathy could start poking at her. Took the rest of the hallway in quick, angry strides. Forgot about restraint and slammed the door to the guest bedroom as hard as she could, not knowing whether it would wake Drakken up and not particularly caring if it did. Skimmed the website one last time to make sure she wasn't missing some key piece of information that would be crucial to his survival. Found nothing. Turned off her computer and the lights. Climbed back into bed, lay down, and closed her eyes.

And she waited for dawn.

**()()()()**

**EDITED 11/13 for typos.  
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	5. Chapter 5

**Okay, so I lied.**

**I didn't mean to - I honestly thought I could limit this thing to six chapters, but Chapter Five mutated in a monster, so I had to chop it in half. Right now, we're looking at seven chapters, providing no further transmogrifications occur.**

**The good news is, I think I've mostly got my groove back when it comes to writing, so updates might come more than every four months now. :/ Party on.**

()()()()()()()

He was dead.

He _had _to be. Nobody could possibly survive this kind of agony.

His limbs were weak and useless, as if his bones had been vaporized. His throat felt like he'd swallowed toxic sludge. His belly was flipping backwards and upside-down. His skin felt too tight, and his mouth was so dry his lips were practically glued together. His eyes were stuck shut, too, with that yucky crusty stuff that had formed in the corners of them while he slept. And if his breath smelled anything like it tasted, he could kill weeds with it.

There was light. He could tell because the nothingness behind his eyes was orangish instead of black. Too much light. Way too much. Made him feel sick. Most of the windows in his lair were blacked out, to keep out the prying eyes of Kim Possible and any of her fellow goody-goodies. So where was the light coming from?

Unless they weren't in his lair. He couldn't tell. The squishy thing he was laying on was big enough to be his bed, but he was so dizzy and misoriented, he could have been on Saturn. Okay, not Saturn - it was made of gas; you couldn't land on it. . .

If only he could remember where he'd fallen asleep, then he'd probably know where he was now. But, in his brain's memory storage, where there should have been a file for the night before, there was nothing but a scrap heap. A jumbled blur of things so fuzzy he couldn't tell if he'd lived them or just dreamed them.

HenchCo's basement, big and clean and wide-open. Glasses of punch that tasted better and better the more he drank. Someone - was it him? - getting very, very sick in a trash can. A killer jellybean brutally attacking him with a toaster.

All right, so that last one had probably been a dream. But the others drifted in and out of his brain, wouldn't stay still long enough for him to examine them.

Except for one that floated to the top, like it was less dense than the others. Shego, sort of shiny and glowy, as if she's radioactive. Glaring at him. Eyes full of disgust. Her mouth moves slowly.

"You. Are. Drunk." The words fall heavy and cold, like steel. He feels as exposed and humiliated as he did when he was fourteen and Carl Thompson threw him out of the locker room half-naked.

Drakken gnawed on the inside of his cheek and prayed that was just part of a dream, too. But it hurt too bad not to be real.

He squinted his eyes open a crack and struggled to focus them, to see if he could recognize his surroundings. Nope. All he could make out were dark shapes. A circle, a square, a rectangle, a parallelogram, he didn't know what to call that one. . .

Drakken moaned from his churning gut and brought a hand up to shield his eyes from the tiny sliver of light that stabbed him right in the corneas. He hadn't known it was possible for eyeballs to hurt, but they did.

Everything on him hurt, actually. His elbows. His tongue. His chest. His toenails. His stomach. Every single hair in his eyebrow. His head. _Especially _his head. It throbbed like someone was thunking it with a hammer, right between his eyes.

Which brought him back to whether or not he was dead. Surely feeling this lousy had to be fatal. On the other hand, if he were dead, he probably wouldn't be in pain anymore. Unless, of course, he'd gone to -

Fear clutched at Drakken's throat, and he slammed his eyes shut so he couldn't see fire and brimstone and little horned creatures with pitchforks. He could almost smell the poisonous smoke, feel the heat singeing his skin. When he put both hands up to his head to keep it from splitting in two and felt a strong, steady pounding, he was sure it was some kind of evil drumbeat announcing the ruler of darkness, come to claim his soul.

Thirty panicked seconds later, he realized the drum went faster the more scared he got. Its speed was directly linked to his fear. It wasn't a drum at all. It was his heartbeat, and it slowed down a bit as Drakken let out a shaky little laugh.

And if he was dead and in - in - in - well, in a place even worse than prison, his heart wouldn't still be beating. He couldn't be one-hundred-percent sure, since he'd never been dead before. But he'd put his certainty at a nice solid eighty-three percent, and that was a big enough number to let his eyes flutter open and peer warily at the shapes closest to him.

Phew. No flames. No devils. Just his favorite cup, a big, chunky, blue-like-his-lab-coat mug with blue-like-his-skin polka dots and a handle shaped like a test tube, filled with something red and fizzy. A green-gloved hand was holding it out to him.

"Here," a voice said. It sounded familiar, but it was too fuzzy and faraway for Drakken to place. "Drink this."

Drakken froze. Voices suddenly joined the mental picture he was trying to form of last night. So far, all he had was a blurry jumble of sights and sounds that made him even dizzier.

_"You look a little thirsty there, buddy. Can I get you another glass?"_

_"So, a couple of my friends and I were taking bets on whether or not you could chug this in fifteen seconds."_

_"This is a most FASCINATING story, Drakken. Here, have some more punch. Now continue with the telling of what happened NEXT!"_

Drakken wrenched away from the evil liquid, from the person trying to torture him further. "No!" he heard himself bark. "That's how I got into this in the first place!"

"Dr. D," the voice replied, sounding impatient. "It's Gatorade."

He ran that word through his mental search engine and no results were found. "I don't _know _anyone named Gatorade!" he snapped back. His mouth was so dry, he could feel his lips splitting into dozens of tiny cracks.

It didn't matter who this person was; there was no way they were going to get him to ingest that mysterious beverage. He knew better now.

_Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and you'll wake up with fleas._

_Or something very similar._

The voice sighed as if it were trying to talk a toddler down from a tantrum. "No, I'm Shego. _This_-" a long finger tapped the side of the mug - "is Gatorade."

It _was _Shego. Nobody else could sound sarcastic just identifying herself. Everything would be okay if he did what she said. In some distant corner of his mind, Drakken knew he'd listened a voice last night that he shouldn't have trusted.

But this was different. This was Shego. She would never, ever do anything to harm him.

Still, Drakken leaned over the mug and gave its contents a suspicious sniff, just to make sure she knew exactly what she was giving him. The fizz stung his nose and had just a hint of fruitiness, not at all like the sickly-sweet, drool-inducing smell of the punch that had intoxicated him against his will. This smelled more like - medicine.

Medicine wasn't always delicious, but no taste could be worse than the one that lingered in his mouth right now. And he really could use some, since he was so very, very sick. Dying would almost be a relief, unless his Sunday School teacher had been right about where people who tried to take over the world went when they died, which she might have been, because she was a smart lady. . .

Refusing to let that thought go any further, Drakken managed to lift his head. That wasn't easy - some odd force kept pulling it back toward his pillow, like the two were magnetized. He snatched the mug from Shego's firm hands with his own shaky one and took a tiny, cautious sip. Nothing burst or imploded or started bleeding. The strange concoction known as Gatorade stayed where it was supposed to.

He sipped again, a bigger sip this time. It felt funny and bubbly in his tummy and put a tickling pressure in his throat, but that beat the fire that had boiled in both of those locations earlier. Another sip. Nothing had ever felt so good. His skin seemed to be loosening, and he could feel his mouth coming out of its dried-up pucker.

Drakken's eyes had adjusted to the dimness by now, and they were able to turn the dark shapes into outlines of familiar things. The square was his giant TV screen/monitor. The circle was the Magno-Scope Disruptor Sphere (maybe _that_was why his head was so strongly attracted to his pillow). The parallelogram was his nightstand. The rectangle was his bed. And, most importantly, the previously undefinable shape turned out to be a wiry person with four-foot-long hair perched on the edge of his bed.

"Shego!" he cried. Croaked. His throat was raw and scratchy, and his voice sounded more like a triple bass than his usual baritone.

His sidekick just gave him The Scowl, the one where he eyebrows slashed over her eyes like checkmarks, the one she usually reserved for Kim Possible. He hadn't seen her look at him like that since the time he accidentally disintegrated her nail file.

She was mad at him. At least, he _thought_ that was what her face was trying to tell him. Drakken swallowed at the bubble forming in his esophagus. He didn't know anything for sure anymore.

If only he could remember what had happened last night. . . but he could barely remember his next question.

"Am I dead?"

Shego didn't even twitch. Her eyes pierced straight through his. "Not yet."

Okay, so she _was _mad. Drakken shrank back from her death glare by sheer instinct and immediately hated himself for it.

Shego shouldn't have the power to make him cower (which rhymed, but that wasn't important now). He should have been glaring right back at her and snarling out a brilliant retort. But he was sicker than he could ever remember being - and his head hurt so bad - and his throat was inflating like it was being squeezed with a blood pressure cuff and he really needed to -

_Urrrrrrrp. _He forgot to do it quietly. It came out long and big and loud, and he could tell by the look on Shego's face that his breath did smell as bad as it tasted.

Drakken sank back against his pillow, feeling twenty pounds lighter and slightly less miserable. He managed a tiny smile that stretched the dry, cracked skin on his lips until it bled. _Ooh - not good._

Shego, on the other hand, was nowhere close to grinning. She pulled her mouth in like she was trying to swallow it, and one checkmark-eyebrow shot up so high it nearly went off her forehead. Now _that_ was an expression he recognized. It was her _Could-your-manners-BE-a-little-worse-Doc? _face, and it never failed to hack Drakken off. He lectured Shego about her manners all the time - whenever she ignored him or mocked him or interrupted him - and she just brushed his words aside. But he couldn't get away with so much as a single, solitary, much-needed burp? Was there no justice in this world?

Drakken mumbled something under his breath that he hoped sounded vaguely like an "Excuse me" and waited for Shego's eyes to soften just a tiny bit. They didn't. He tried to breathe big and deep, but his heart was beating so fast his lungs had to pant to keep up, and his nose was all snuffly - like he'd been crying, he realized with a grimace.

He tightened his grip on the mug to hide how bad his hands were shaking. He felt very small and vulnerable, more like Drew Lipsky than Dr. Drakken, and he didn't want Shego to know that. It was hard to remember how to be his supervillain self when his whole body was jittering with nervous energy and he had no way to let any of it out. Even twiddling his fingers made him want to throw up.

He sighed - that hurt, too - raised the mug to his mouth, and took another few swallows of Gatorade. It still made him feel tingly and weird and burpy, but it was better than the pain that throbbed everywhere else. This time, he brought his fist up to his mouth and managed to catch the belch as it slid out between his lips.

"Good, good," Drakken heard Shego say. He grinned painfully, chest waiting to puff out with pride at her praise. Instead of commenting on his improved manners, though, she just nodded at the cup. "That'll rehydrate you."

Drakken stared down at the mug's contents, watching bubbles rise to the surface and pop, feeling like his head was about to do the same thing. It turned out his mind's file cabinet contained some information on Gatorade after all. It was the type of beverage known as a "sports drink," since it helped quickly replace the fluids the body lost through sweat. It was also a good flu drink, because - because - because -

"Throwing up dehydrates you," he informed Shego, nodding seriously so she'd see there was something he knew for sure after all. No matter what had happened last night, that was still true. It was a scientific fact.

Shego gave him a fakey-sweet smile, like she was trying to sell him a used car. "Yeah," she chirped in a matching voice. "So does alcohol."

Drakken's heart shifted sideways in his chest. The itch grew into a fire.

"Quit saying 'alcohol'!" he snapped. "I wasn't drunk!"

Shego's mouth curled up on one side. "Uh, yeah, you were." Her eyes took on a phony softness, the way she looked at him when he had a fever was rambling on incoherently about how much he liked pineapples. It was her way of saying, without words, _You have NO idea what you're talking about._

For a moment, Drakken forgot his misery. Suddenly the only thing that mattered was proving her wrong and getting that look off her face. "No, I wasn't! I would know! I was _there_!"

His use of logic didn't faze Shego, however. "So was I. And you - " her eyes narrowed - "were plastered."

Drakken squirmed. He'd never heard the word "plastered" used like that before, but he could tell what it meant by the curl in Shego's lips and the shake of her head. The Gatorade started to twist in his stomach. "I was not!" His shouted words bounced off the walls and back into his head - hard, like being hit with a baseball bat.

"You were too," Shego shot back.

"Was not!"

"Were too!"

"Was not!" Drakken's voice cracked up into double bass.

Shego's stayed as smooth and cool as her face. "Were too."

"Was not infinity!" He let the words hang triumphantly in the air for a moment. There! Got her with the infinity clause!

Evidently Shego didn't care about the rules of arithmetic any more than she did the names of his Doomsday devices. Without missing a beat, she replied, "Was too - infinity _squared_."

"That's not even mathematically possible!" Drakken burst out. She just chuckled. Never mind that she'd broken one of the laws of the universe. Never mind that his college professors would have flunked her immediately if she tried that on them. Somehow she'd still won.

Frustration squeezed at his chest like heartburn that a Tums couldn't fix, the same frustration that always boiled up when someone didn't get it and he wasn't sure how to explain. If he didn't get rid of it soon, his head was going to explode.

Drakken had no idea whether the words on his lips were the right ones, but they were all he had, so he decided to go with them. "Really, Shego, how could I be drunk?" He leaned in closer to her, hands flailing earnestly at the air to show her how important it was that she understand him. "All I had to drink last night was fruit punch. . ."

He didn't get a chance to finish that thought, because a look came over Shego's face that he hadn't seen since that one time the buffoon had turned evil. A look of complete and utter shock. Her mouth feel open, her eyes popped out of their slits, and even her brows looked dumbfounded. He liked that word, _dumbfounded_. . .

She started to shake her head sadly, the way she had when Commodore Puddles had gotten his head stuck in a cereal box. "Oh, no, Dr. D," she said slowly, voice filled with disbelief. "Oh, you poor little moron."

A sudden sinking sensation swept over Drakken, like he'd stepped in quicksand where there should have been solid ground, or stuck his feet under the bed and found a pair of rabid ferrets instead of his fuzzy slippers. The rest of the world fell away, leaving him alone with his fiery chest and his gaping sidekick and the terrible thing he had just discovered.

"That. . . was . . . not. . . fruit. . . punch. . . was. . . it?" Drakken asked. In a quiet voice he didn't even know he had. Pausing after each word to refill his lungs. For the first time in his life, he hoped he was wrong.

Shego shook her head. The astonishment was gone, replaced by scorn. "Gee, what was your first clue?"

He would have answered her if he'd known what she was asking. And if he had remembered how to speak.

Her I-don't-believe-this expression _had _been his first clue. There hadn't been anything ominous about the fruit-punch-that-wasn't-really-fruit-punch-at-all. No warning sign on the table, no skull and crossbones etched into the bowl, no toxic fumes rising from it, nobody staggering and hiccuping in the background.

"No, that was red wine," Shego continued. She was still shaking her head, and she had her hand up over her eyes like she couldn't bear to watch him figure it out.

_Red _wine. How many shades did the cursed stuff come in?

Drakken had seen wine before at the supermarket, but he'd never thought to check what color it was. All he'd noticed was how villainously dark and shiny the bottles were, and how perfectly they'd match the decor in his lair. But they had been way out of his price range, so he'd shrugged and gone off to get chocolate milk, instead -

That train of thought was cut off by a strange hissing sound. Drakken snapped his head up to see Shego doubled over, her breath coming in little wheezes and squeaks.

Great. Now on top of everything else, his accomplice was having an asthma attack and he couldn't help her because he was having a hard time breathing himself.

Just as panic started to creep its way up his spine, Shego came unfolded and stopped gasping long enough to smirk at him. Drakken could see the mirth in her eyes.

She wasn't dying. She was _laughing_. He was lying here, unable to move, belly turning itself inside out, head pulsing with more pain than an object of its size should be capable of producing - and Shego was yukking it up like he was her personal court jester.

"Shego!" Drakken scraped out. He could feel his face threatening to crumple, and he gritted his teeth to keep it hard. "Why are you laughing at me?" he demanded.

Shego wiped the corners of her eyes, which made his feel crustier than ever. "Because if I don't, I'm gonna cry."

Whoa. Did she mean that? Drakken squinted his already-puffy eyes at her, but her face didn't give him any clues.

He'd never seen Shego cry before, except when she was Moodulated. That didn't count, of course, but it had still technically happened, and it was enough to let him know he never wanted it to happen again. Almost scared him worse than the fits of rage that came out of nowhere. At least he was used to Shego being angry, used to trying to avoid her wrath. The tears - those were a different story. He hadn't known where _they _were coming from, either, and they were so unShegolike that his instincts had told him to get out of there as fast as he possibly could. But he couldn't run away and hide while she was crying. She'd sounded so sad.

Drakken hiccuped around the ball in his throat, big as a wad of chewing gum. He didn't want Shego to be sad. She was important to him. But when she laughed at him, that made _him _sad, and he was important to him too.

It was bad enough that she was right. . . again. Didn't she ever get tired of always being right? And this time - Drakken felt himself go cold all over as it sunk in what Shego's being right meant this time.

He, the world's most notorious mad scientist, had gotten drunk. Sloppy, falling-down, throwing-up drunk, like those poor saps on old sitcoms - the ones that had too much to drink at an office party and then got fired for punching out their boss or puking on his shoes. Drakken was no expert on those things, but it had been easy to tell what was wrong with them. They tilted to the side when they tried to walk, they stumbled over nothing, and they talked strangely, like peanut butter was stuck to the roofs of their mouths.

All their coworkers laughed at them, and so had Drakken. Why shouldn't he? They were as loopy and out of control as if they'd been wearing his Silly Hats.

The thought of looking that helplessly stupid in front of such inferior minds made him want to hide his head under his pillow. What would this do to his villainous reputation?

Drakken gave a bitter snort. What a stupid question. He knew full well what it would do to it. It would destroy it - and leave him with nothing.

The Gatorade flipped again, and the next thing he knew, it was _him _who was doubled over, and not with laughter. It was something nasty deep in his gut that bent him at the waist and made him press his legs together as tight as he could to keep his knees from knocking.

Drakken stayed like that for what must have been eons, clutching his stomach with one hand and his head with the other, for fear if he moved he'd either throw up or die. At this point, he actually would have preferred the latter.

But neither one happened, not even when he dared to straighten up and untangle his limbs and lay down flat on his back. Shego's face swam into his vision. She wasn't laughing anymore, but her eyes were still glittering. He couldn't bear to look at them, so he shifted his own up to the ceiling and blinked rapidly to try and get some moisture back into them.

That heavy, worse-than-embarrassment feeling pressed down on his shoulders again, like he was trying to hold up one of the henchmen, and Drakken had no idea why. He opened his mouth to order it gone, even over the jabbing, poked-with-a-paper-clip thought hissing that he did _too _know what it was. But what came out instead was a shivery little, "So - I really was drunk?"

"Absolutely hammered," Shego replied emotionlessly.

Make that _two _of the henchmen. The paper-clip-poke had been right. Shame. How could a feeling, a mere emotion with no physical form, be so heavy? It made his head dip downward, his cheeks flame red, the room seem to whirl in a way that was somehow all too familiar.

"Am I still?" he asked fearfully.

Shego rolled her eyes like he'd asked her if there were beavers on the moon. "No."

"But - " Drakken reached up and touched one finger tenderly to his temple - "I'm still sick." The wrong kind of moisture flooded his eyes, burning extra bad because his tear ducts were so worn out from last night, and he swiped at them angrily with his fists.

Shego slit her eyes at him again. Shaming eyes. "Yeah, that's called a hangover," she chirped in that super-happy, super-fake voice she only used when she was _really _ticked with somebody.

_Hangover_. The word sounded familiar, though if he had any information relating to it, it was tucked away in some dusty corner of his brain with the capital of North Dakota and the name of Kim Possible's buffoonish sidekick.

Panicked thoughts started to form, interrupting each other and each scrambling to be the most important. Was it deadly? Could he be paralyzed? Would he have to have surgery?

Before he could find the calm voice he would need to use to avoid further humiliation, though, Shego answered the questions he hadn't asked. (Could she read his mind on top of everything else?) "It's basically harmless," she told him. "But you're gonna be one sick puppy for a while."

"Define 'a while,'" Drakken growled back, grateful for the newfound rasp to his voice. Reminded him of those gravel-voiced villains in movies who made people shudder with fear every time they spoke, even when they were only ordering a double cheeseburger to go. It made him sound very menacing, even if his words weren't coming out as cold and smooth as he would have liked.

Shego's lip curled up into a smile that didn't look particularly friendly. "A few hours, Little Mr. Sunshine."

Her tone was sugar-sweet, patronizing. And he felt sticky and gross from sleeping in his clothes. His gloves alone were soaked with so much perspiration, they clung to him like a third layer of skin. With furious fingers, Drakken reached up and yanked them off, gasping with relief when cool air hit his sweaty palms.

Some relief. Not enough. He needed more.

The frustration welled up inside him, and Drakken knew the only way to get rid of it was to either yell - which would probably make his head pop open - or throw something. Preferably something very large, but his gloves would do in a pinch.

He wadded them up into a lump and hurled said lump at the wall. It hit with a solid THUMP, loud enough to be satisfying, but quiet enough not to send more pain stabbing through his skull. It also stirred up a memory inside him. Not of last night - that was all still lost in a haze - of a time he thought he'd buried someplace where it couldn't climb out.

Like some sadistic instrument of time travel, Drakken's mind started going back, back, back. So far back that his past self wasn't even a supervillain, but a college kid with rimless glasses and a voice too big and booming for his scrawny body.

_He bent toward his chemistry book, running his finger under the same sentence for the third time, trying to ignore the voices of his classmates. It was hard to concentrate on homogenous mixtures while they nattered on about who was going out with who and whether mullets were going out of style and all those other trivial things he thought he'd left behind when he'd enrolled at the Middleton Institute of Science and Technology. The professor hadn't arrived yet, so they didn't even feel the need to whisper._

_The professor wasn't the only one late for class today, though. A student's chair stood conspicuously empty, which was apparently the reason for the frantic conversation going on around him._

_If _he'd_ missed class, nobody would even notice until roll call. But this dude was impossible to overlook. He was always at the center of everything, always surrounded by faithful friends and adoring fans like he was king of the world or something. Got invited to all the parties. Good-looking kid. Smart but not geeky. The anti-Drew Lipsky._

_All the girls who were madly in love with him - which was two-thirds of them - were worried about him. Drew didn't really know why. Chemistry was the first class of the day on Tuesdays, and it wasn't unheard of for a student to sleep through it. Alarm clocks didn't always work right, especially when your roommates set them on Hawaiian Standard Time just to mess with your mind. But, no, they were all convinced he'd been eaten by a wild animal or something._

_He rolled his eyes. Like there even _were_ any wild animals near Middleton. Okay, there was the occasional coyote, and one guy in his biology class claimed he'd seen a rabid squirrel the size of a poodle down by the lake where they were building that new summer camp -_

_"What if he was in a car wreck?" one of the girls cried. Literally. She was almost in tears._

_Drew raised his head to gaze around him in disgust. How did these fools expect to earn their degrees when they would rather gossip about one of their classmates than crack a book? Honestly, sometimes it seemed like he was the only smart person left on Earth. Well, him and his posse._

Sadness, anger, and something wistful exploded in Drakken's head, and he clenched his teeth against it. But the memory kept right on going without his consent.

_"I'm sure he's fine, guys." That came from the only other person in the room who even appeared to be attempting to study, a girl with a long braid all the way to her waist and cute little crooked teeth. Drew quickly wiped the disdain off his face so she wouldn't think it was directed toward her, too._

She'd only attended MIST for that year. Drakken couldn't recall her name - wasn't sure if he'd ever known it - but he remembered _her_. She was nice.

_"Yeah," one of the popular kids - a friend of the missing - chimed in. "Probably just has a hangover."_

_There was a universal snicker, and Drew felt a tiny flash of sympathy for the kid. Some friends they were, laughing at him behind his back. He would never have laughed if it had been James or Bob or Ramesh, and they never would have laughed if it had been him._

Pain. Pain. Pain.

_Drew hunched back over his textbook to hide the thin smile tugging at his lips. He didn't know what a "hangover" was, but he did know that a true student of science wouldn't let anything stand in the way of his quest for knowledge._

Drakken grimaced to himself at the thought of how smug he'd been. If Shego was right - if what he was experiencing now was a hangover - then he didn't blame the guy for missing class. How could anyone concentrate, even on a subject as fascinating as chemistry, with their brain pulsating against the walls of their head like that? He'd had concussions that hurt less.

"I think I've heard of those. Hangovers, I mean," he whispered. Had to whisper. His head screamed and thumped like a rock band was performing in it, and he was sure to talk any longer would activate his gag reflex. "Back in college."

"Wild child that you were," Shego put in snidely. Way too snidely, as far as Drakken was concerned. He watched her - wonderful, terrible Shego with the eyes that saw everything and the hands that never flailed the air in frustration - and felt like he was being yanked in half.

Part of him wanted to demand that she leave immediately and not come back until he wasn't hangovered anymore. Evil megalomaniacs didn't let anyone see them in such a weakened state, especially a sidekick who already forgot her place entirely too often.

But, as much as he hated to admit it, another part of him longed for her to come over and. . . well, not fuss over him, not the way Mother did. Not kiss his forehead and pinch his cheeks. But maybe she could wipe his face with a wet washcloth and tell him tell everything would be okay, so he might be able to stop shaking.

Drakken didn't know which part to listen to, so he just twiddled his thumbs and refused to glance her way. "There's still one thing I don't understand, though," he admitted.

Shego sniffed. "Just one?"

Drakken didn't even dignify that with a reply. Okay, maybe he harrumphed a little, but it was a very small harrumph, and it was low and growly and sounded more like an I-can't-be-bothered-to-respond-to-your-sneaky-comments than a that-stings-and-I'm-trying-not-to-show-it. At least he hoped so.

It didn't take long, though, for Drakken's mind to wander from Shego's sarcasm back down memory lane. He couldn't find a way to fight it, so he just let it flow. He needed all the information he could get that might help him decipher last night, even info that came from ugly places in his past.

_Drew stood in the doorway gaping, his eyes bulging so far he was sure they were going to pop out of their sockets and fall onto the carpet. It was already so grimy, a couple eyeballs could only improve it._

_The guy he'd talked to in the hall outside Chem Lab had said this was going to be a study party, but the only textbooks he could see were being hurled across the room. Of course, it was hard to see much of anything through the fog of smoke from someone's cigarette._

_Music blasted from the speakers, rattling the floor under him. It was cranked up to its maximum volume, so loud he was pretty sure they could hear it in Norway, but he couldn't make out anything resembling lyrics or even a tune. It was the kind of music he only listened to when he was in a particularly rebellious mood, because he knew Mother hated it. "Death metal," Eddy called it, and Drew could see why. Had they been able to turn it up any louder, it certainly would have deafened him, if not killed him outright. Neither of those was a very comforting thought._

_Everything inside Drew commanded him to get away from there, to run back to his dorm and barricade himself in there with his physics homework for the rest of the night. Everything but a little corner of his brain. It was a tiny, stupid part, but it was loud and it was angry and it told him that if he backed down from this everyone would think he really was the biggest loser on the planet. And he knew if one more person thought that about him one more time, he would go crazy._

_Drew sucked in a huge breath and made his way across the room, stale chips crunching under his shoes. Squinting against the smoke, he spotted a boy and a girl sitting on a couch, attached the mouth. Eyes closed to shut out the rest of the world. Obviously highly embarrassed._

_He felt a grin slip across his face. This looked like a job for his anti-bonding spray. Sheer genius, that stuff - apply it before camping, and no ticks or leeches would be able to stick to your skin. Not to mention your mother couldn't pinch your cheeks, and that was always a plus._

_He was making his way toward them, the words, "Hey, do you need some help?" already teetering on his lips, when they pulled apart and looked at each other in a really funny way. "Dreamily," he was pretty sure it was called._

_Oh. They'd been kissing. Drew turned around and scurried off, cheeks burning. There was still a lot he didn't know about that._

_Once he was safely out of the sight of the pair - was that what they called people who were dating now, a pair? - he scanned the room for anyone or anything familiar. But his vision was obscured by the smoke and by the fact that his eyes were bunching the way they always did when he wanted to crawl into a hole and die. For an uneasy moment, he didn't care if he looked geeky. He would have bolted for the door if he'd known where it was._

_Out of nowhere, a female being sprang into his path - blonde, with a shirt that had obviously shrunk in the wash, because she didn't seem aware that it was showing her navel. Drew shifted his gaze away. His mother had always told him to respect girls, and it was hard to think respectful thoughts about one when you could see her whole belly._

_Out of the corner of her eye, he could see her watching him, like she was waiting for something. And she was giggling hysterically, for no reason he could figure out. He never knew what to do around girls, especially giggly ones._

_So he played it safe. "Hi," he coughed, willing his voice not to crack._

_She laughed even harder, like "Hi" was the funniest thing he possibly could have said. Either she was the biggest ditz on the planet, or she'd had too much of whatever was in that can she was holding. Something alcoholic, obviously. Probably beer, since it came in a can. An observant scientist noticed those things._

_"Hi, cutie," she replied through juicy giggles._

_Okay, she was definitely drunk._

_A teasing gleam shimmered through her glazed eyes. Drew tensed, waiting for the insult, but when she opened her mouth, all that came out was another giggle and, "Wanna drink?"_

_He sagged with relief. What a thoughtful gesture! "Yes, thank you," he replied, nodding his agreement in her direction. "I'm feeling a bit parched, and a nice iced tea would really hit the spot. . ."_

_Drew's voice trailed off as he realized the girl was holding out a can to him. This one was unopened, but other than that, it was identical to the nearly-empty one she clutched in her other hand._

_His palms went clammy. He formed a "No thank you" in his mouth but couldn't seem to force it out. They'd talked about how to handle this kind of stuff in high school, but he must have been studying for a test or something. Why wasn't he paying attention?_

_It wasn't just the blonde he had to turn down, either. A group of kids had materialized out of nowhere and surrounded her. Mostly boys. A few girls. All holding their own cans and looking mildly interested. All popular. Their necks were craned forward like they were trying to get a better view, and in an unfocused way Drew was reminded of a flock of vultures hunched over a carcass._

_He swallowed hard. None of these people had ever been out-and-out mean to him, but he'd caught them smirking at each other when he tripped over his own feet or had to use his finger follow along in the textbook. For now, he was a mere blip on the radar screens. Now they were all watching, waiting for him to prove if he was cool or not._

_Drew closed his eyes and fought to keep his breathing regular._ Stay cool, man, _he commanded himself in ultra-hip lingo. _It's not like it's arsenic or anything. It's just beer. You don't have to go crazy and get drunk. Just a few sips to show you're not a stupid little kid anymore.

_Another hard swallow._ Mother doesn't have to find out. _The thought of defying her made a thrill run down Drew's spine and guilt well up in his stomach._

_It was a good pep talk. He mentally reviewed those six sentences, over and over again, until confidence tilted up his chin and courage held his shoulders square and proud._

_He needed to act on that before it disappeared. Opening his eyes, Drew snatched the can out of the girl's hand, pulled the tab, and stared down into it. It occurred to him that he'd rather study this stuff under a microscope than drink it. It smelled funny - stunk, really._

_Oh, well. No turning back now. Saying yes and then changing your mind looked dumber than refusing it in the first place. He raised the can to his lips, said a quick prayer, and took something much bigger than a sip but much smaller than his usual gulp._

_Bitter foam filled his mouth and was spewed back out faster than that evil vending machine on campus rejected his dollar bills. Some of it sprayed so far across the room that he lost track of its trajectory; some dribbled down his chin and and landed in a warm, brown splotch on his shirt - the white dress shirt he'd ironed just for this so-called study party._

_That should have been all of it. His shirt was soaked in what had to be twice the amount of liquid his mouth could hold. But some of it was still in there, clinging to his taste buds, poisoning them, almost making him sick. Drew spat and spat, but he couldn't get rid of the nastiness._

_It was so disgusting, he finally forgot about looking cool and brought both hands up to his mouth to try and scrub the taste off his tongue, dropping the can in the process. It tipped over, and its contents spilled out and disappeared into the mess of stains on the carpet. Everyone howled, Giggle Gal loudest of all._

_Suddenly, it didn't matter that he lived in a dormitory or that his voice had changed or that he actually needed to shave once a week. He was back to being the second-grader that nobody wanted on their kickball team._

_Drew forced himself not to hang his head, but facing the other kids straight on, even though it was supposed to make him seem brave, was even worse. Looking away wouldn't help, though. He'd memorized the faces that had haunted him for the past nineteen years._

_Twisted with laughter. Noses stuck arrogantly up in the air. Eyes scanning everyone in their crowd and leaving him out._

_Being laughed at had always hacked him off, but recently, ever since he'd arrived at college, it filled Drew with a newfound rage he wasn't quite sure what to do with. This was supposed to be the place where people recognized his genius and respected him for it, yet so far nothing like that had happened. It made him want to blow something up. On purpose._

_Sometimes, he worried that he really _was_ going crazy._

_That rage roaring in his ears, he bent down to pick up the can, though he didn't know what the point was. He could probably down the whole thing in five seconds, and it wouldn't improve his social standing one bit._

_As if to prove it, a foot planted itself smack in the seat of his pants and gave it a push. It wasn't a very big push, but Drew was still wobbly from nerves and he wasn't exactly The Incredible Hulk to begin with, and he went sprawling._

_As he teetered in midair for a suspended second, he realized that their Bully Radar must have finally registered him as a target. The next thing he knew, he was flat on his face with his glasses digging into the bridge of his nose. The laughter shrieked even louder, like he was the best entertainment since _Tron.

Oh, yes, very scholarly, gentlemen - and ladies. I'm impressed. The world certainly needs scientists who can guzzle beer and shove nerds to the ground. _For once, Drew had the right words, but his throat was tight and he knew tears would come with them. He could only lay there, choking on embarrassment and rogue drops of beer._

_And thinking. Even through the humiliation, a brilliant plan was taking shape in his brain._

_As soon as he was old enough, he would run for president. By that time, he would be the nation's most eminent chemist and everyone would know how intelligent he was, so of course they'd elect him. And once he was in office, he'd fix the economy and require gas stations to clean their bathrooms and, most importantly, outlaw bullying. Think up punishments for those who did anyway. He would be a hero!_

_Imagine how many little kids' lives he would improve. No longer would they have to live in fear of their classmate! Best of all, no one would ever be able to pick on _him _again, because he'd be in charge. Who would make fun of the president?_

_He didn't know how long he lay there, fuming and writing his inaugural speech, when he heard footsteps behind him - slow, even ones. Whoever this person was, he wasn't rushing over to gawk at the geek, but he was in no hurry to defend him, either. Drew squeezed his eyes shut and just hoped the guy wouldn't step on him._

_The footsteps got closer and he flinched, waiting to feel the sole of a loafer dig into the back of his hand. Instead, fingers curled themselves cautiously around his wrist. When he opened his eyes a crack, he saw another hand reaching down to him._

_They were big hands - twice the size of his own - but the fingers were smooth and careful, with the formula for velocity written across one knuckle. The hands of a fellow scientist._

_That was the only reason Drew accepted the outstretched hand, let the man pull him to his feet and put a steadying arm around his shoulders. Being touched still sent chills through him, but he knew those hands wouldn't hurt him._

_"For what it's worth, I don't understand the appeal of it, either," the owner of the hands muttered. His voice was baffled but still intelligent-sounding, like a genius whose calculations had been off for the first time in his life. It was a voice that sounded familiar, but Drew's brain was too scrambled to place it._

_The man with the scientific voice ushered him away from the howling group. Was it still him they were laughing at? he wondered. Or had they had their fill of Lipsky lameness for the night and moved on to something else?_

_He wasn't sure where they were going, but as the music and the laughter faded behind them, he knew it was away from here, and that was all that mattered. He gulped down a lump and concentrated on trying to remember how to speak._

_Even when the carpet turned to tile and the music was nothing more than a dull thump in the background, Drew stared down at his shoes. All the bravado he'd been able to muster earlier had evaporated, and he couldn't look his rescuer in the eye. He was grateful, of course, but how mortifying was it to need to be rescued in the first place? What if this guy planned to make him his eternal slave, since he owed him now? What if that was _why _he had saved him? Drew had heard of that - it was called "extortion," and it was illegal, not to mention most unkind -_

_The voice broke into his thoughts. It was a friendly voice, not a smug, I'm-going-to-hang-this-over-your-head-for-the-rest-of-your-life one. "You okay there?" it asked kindly._

_Drew chanced a glance upward. Through dangerously watery eyes, he recognized a face. James Possible._

One of the last times he'd ever liked the man.

_"Sure," he answered automatically, but he wasn't convinced that it was the truth. The more he thought about what he had just escaped from, the stiffer his muscles grew. He could hear someone wheezing loudly - in panic - straight through his nose, and he was pretty sure it wasn't James._

_He reached up and pinched his nostrils shut, but then he had to let his mouth gape open to breathe through it. It made him look like a fish._

_Drew groaned out loud as he assessed the damage to his clothes for the first time. His pants were merely greasy, but the shirt was smeared with salsa and more beer and who knew what else. He considered yanking it off and crumpling it into a ball - the anger was boiling in his chest again. But he didn't especially want to expose the ribs stacked like ladder rungs where every other college guy had six-pack abs._

_Drew straightened his shoulders - broadening, but still so bony - and stood as tall as he could. He felt gawky and out of proportion next to James, so he fastened his gaze somewhere around his friend's kneecaps. "Does that girl need someone to call a cab for her?" he asked. That was how you were supposed to get a friend home if they'd been drinking. The giggly female wasn't anything close to his friend, and he didn't really care if she got pulled over, but bad things happened when you drove drunk. They'd said so at that pep rally in high school. (Sure, _now_ it was coming back to him.)_

_"Given that she lives three doors down, I'd say probably not," James replied with a chuckle. Drew jerked away from him, hot blotches popping out on his face. He couldn't handle anyone else laughing at him tonight, rescuer or not._

_Curiosity got the better of him, though, and he peeked back over his shoulder, right up into James's amused eyes. He tried not to let that bother him - way easier said than done._

_"So," Drew asked, "how - uh - how did you find me?" That scientific desire for knowledge was edging out his fear and indignation. Did people just intuitively know when their friends were in danger? He wouldn't know - he'd never really had any friends until James and those guys._

_He pictured James sitting at his desk, working on some mathematical equation, when a sudden, tingly sense of dread creeps over him, like Spider-Man's Spider-Sense, halting the calculator in mid-punch. "Great Scott!" he cries, leaping from his desk. "Drew's in trouble!"_

_Now, though, James just sighed heavily. "Some guy in aerospace engineering class was bragging about how he tricked a sophomore into coming to one of his beer bashes. Said he told him it was a study party." James paused to shake his head. "If these are the world's future scientists, I'd say the world is in a great deal of trouble."_

_Drew nodded and felt his anger drain away. Finally, someone understood! Maybe he wasn't losing his mind, not really._

_"Anyway," James went on, "I knew I had to warn the poor kid - "_

_That brought the prickles up, just a little._

_" - and then I saw it was you and -" James stopped and shrugged. A comfortable silence fell between them, the kind where no one needed to finish that sentence._

_But Drew mentally finished it anyway, and hugged what it meant to his chest. No one had ever stood up for him like that before. Okay, so his mother would have if she'd known how the other kids were making his life miserable. But he'd never told her, because he didn't want her to worry, and, besides, having your mother come in and bash the bullies over the head with her purse and scream at them to leave her "little Drewbie" alone would only cement his status as a terminal loser. Having a friend defend you, though - that was different._

_Gratitude warmed Drew inside. There had to be some way he could repay James for his kindness. Maybe he'd let him be his vice-president, but that was sixteen long years away. For now, he should at least say, "Thank you for saving my life."_

_He stopped, worked up some saliva, opened his mouth. "James -"_

_That was as far as he got. The words lodged in his throat. Heat crept up to his neck and tingled in his ears, and his brain began to hiss, _This is stupid. James knows you're grateful he stuck up for you. Don't go getting all mushy on him.

_James turned around, cocking an eyebrow. "Yes?"_

_Drew shoved his hands into the pockets of his too-big dress slacks, and glanced again at the stains on his shirt. How on Earth was he ever going to get those out? Mother would know, but if she saw beer on his clothes, she'd go into cardiac arrest. Oh, well. A brilliant chemist such as himself would be able to find - or invent - a substance that would render his shirt squeaky-clean. Especially if his friends helped out - which reminded him that James was still standing there, waiting for an answer or a question or_ something.

_"Let's get back to the dorm," Drew croaked out. "I've got a huge chemistry test to study for."_

_"I hear ya, buddy." The look James gave him wasn't from hero to victim, or even senior to sophomore. It was from one scientist to another._

_That made him feel much better. Okay, so maybe he wasn't the coolest or most popular kid on campus - or the biggest partier. But it wasn't called the Middleton Institute of Partying and Gossip, now, was it?_

_No, this was the Middleton Institute of Science and Technology, and science and technology were where Drew was in his element - err, no pun intended. He never felt insecure balancing a chemical equation, or out of place brewing up concoctions in the lab._

_James understood that. Bob and Ramesh did, too. Drew was able to follow his friend down the hallway with his head held high and his shoulders thrown back and the red spots reduced to two. As long as he had his posse, he might make it until he was old enough to run for president after all._

_Still, Drew felt a frown slipping across his face as something dawned on him. Even when he did run for president - even when he won - even when he abolished bullying in America, it would still only be one country._

_He'd always imagined he'd travel the world someday after he finished college - maybe settle down on some nice little island in the Caribbean. But if he visited China or Brazil or Nigeria he wouldn't be in charge, and people could still hurt him._

_What did he have to do, be king of the world?_

_An odd taste rose in the back of Drew's throat. It was bitter, like the alcohol, but somehow it was sweet, too._

_Much sweeter than it should have been._

He'd never thanked him.

James Possible, who he'd captured just last week. Locked him in a jail cell. Listened to him taunt him with the fact that they used to be pals. It was hard to believe he was the same man who'd once been so kind to him.

Of course, people could change a lot in twenty-two years. Drakken certainly had - and he supposed he wasn't always nice either, but he was a supervillain. What was James's excuse?

Drakken shook those thoughts away with a toss of his head that nearly brought his Gatorade back up. No more flashbacks. Sometimes you could learn from past defeats, but stewing over all the things that threatened to crack him in half never did any good. He would ask Shego the question those memories of college had planted in his brain, and then he would forget all about them, forever this time.

A plan began to take shape in his mind, soothing his knotted-up muscles. He'd wait out this - this "hangover," as it was called, and once it was gone he would get to work on his latest fiendish scheme. Then, sooner rather than later, he'd conquer the world. And _then_ James would pay dearly for not coming through when it really counted.

_"You'll always just be Drew Lipsky - the science student who couldn't make the grade."_ James's voice, in his head, as hard and cold as it had once been warm and open.

He'd never thanked him. If he had, would things be different now?

_Stop!_ Somehow Drakken resisted the urge to clap his hands over his ears. Instead, he hugged his knees up to his chest, which felt like acid was eating straight through it, and rested his head on one knee.

He blinked several times to clear away the fog of the past - ooh, he _liked_ that. Very poetic. James was replaced by Shego, sitting on the edge of his bed with one eyebrow hiked as if to say "We-ell?"

"I tried something once," he admitted, making a face at the sound of his own voice. It sounded croaky and pitiful, like some helpless little boy's. Just then he would have given his right arm to get the villainous boom back. Well, okay, maybe not his _whole_ arm - perhaps just his right pinkie. Or his head; he sort of wished he wasn't attached to his head right now. "Back in college -"

His sidekick rudely interrupted him. "Wow, you really _were_ a party animal."

"Not because I'm a goody-two-shoes or anything, _Shego_!" Drakken snapped back, and he made sure to absolutely spit her name the way Kim Possible did sometimes when they were fighting. He tried to glower at her, but even his eyebrow was too weary to move. "I just couldn't stand the taste - which brings me back to what I was trying to say in the first place!" That was a very good thing, because usually the point he was in the process of making got swept away by the aggravation.

Drakken peered at Shego. If she understood the urgency of his words, it didn't show. Her face was swinging back and forth from disbelief to amusement. Still smirking, she nodded him on.

"The stuff I tried back in college was _terrible_! I mean, I couldn't even keep it in my mouth, it was so - horrendous!" he cried, proud of coming up with such a suitably awful word. "But what I drank last night - " they were entering uncharted territory here, and Drakken heard his voice wavering as he continued - "it didn't taste bad."

He paused to consider that. "Well, I don't actually remember, but I presume it didn't, cause I kept drinking it." The flavor lingering in his mouth was anything but delicious, but then, nothing tasted good the second time around.

Shego matter-of-factly rearranged her face, so that she looked less like somebody's annoying kid sister and more like somebody's stern teacher. "Okay," she said flatly. "Well," and just from those two words, Drakken could tell she _sounded_ like a teacher, too - a very smart one who knew exactly what she was talking about. "What you had back in college was probably beer."

Drakken nodded - or as much as he could nod with what felt like a two-ton weight strapped to his head. Yes, that matched the data he'd gathered all those years ago.

"But what you had last night was _wine_." Shego spread out her hands as she said that last word, like it explained everything.

But it didn't. Drakken blinked his burning eyes at her. "There's a difference?"

Shego gaped as if he had just asked her if there was a difference between ionic and covalent compounds. Great. Now he'd managed to look stupid again, and he couldn't _afford_ to look stupid at this point. Sick and hangovered - hanged-over? - was bad enough.

"Uh, yeah," she finally replied. "Wine's a little stronger, and it's made from fruit -"

He gave another fraction of a nod. Something told him she didn't mean "strong" the way the henchmen were. She was talking about _chemical_ strength - like poison.

Right. Fruit. He remembered that from his high-school chemistry class. Fruit that had fermented, which was a fancy way of saying it went rotten.

Curiosity got the better of him, and Drakken butted in with an inquiry. "What's beer made from?"

Shego rolled her eyes heavenward, like she was praying, which he'd never seen her do before. She'd probably never been scared enough, not even when something blew up six yards away or Kim Possible kicked her legs right out from under her. How did she _do_ that?

"I don't remember off the toppa my head," she said in what sounded exasperatingly close to exasperation. "What do you think I am, Wikipedia?"

As Drakken seethed and wondered how in the world a person could be mistaken for a website, Shego kept going. "Like I said, wine's made from fruit, so it's gonna taste better."

Drakken could feel his brow furrowing as he stared down at his comforter, dizzying stabs of pain shooting through his head. That made sense - at least, some. He liked fruit just fine, though he wouldn't think it would be too good after it fermented. Still, it had to taste better than beer, which was so disgusting it was probably made from spoiled broccoli or kitty litter. Or both. Now, _there_ was something nobody could ever mistake for -

A few of last night's puzzle pieces clicked into place. "More like fruit punch?" he suggested hesitantly.

There was a long silence before Shego sighed and said, "Yeah. More like fruit punch."

Her voice sounded kind of funny. Almost soft. And when Drakken looked to make sure it was really her, he could read her eyes for once. They were saying, _You are such a pathetic little dork that I actually feel SORRY for you._

Drakken jerked his head around and stared pointedly at the wall. He didn't need her pity.

"They have one pretty important thing in common, though." Shego's words were laced with extra sarcasm, all traces of softness gone. "If you drink enough of them, they'll both get you wasted."

Why did there have to be so many different ways to say it? Every new one he heard only made him feel worse.

Drakken studied his Nuclear Powerplants From Around the World calendar and refused to answer. If he tried to speak, he knew his voice would crack and he wouldn't be able to hold back the shame, and he didn't want to give Shego the satisfaction of seeing that. He'd just ignore her until she got tired of pestering him and left.

"So." He felt the mattress un-sag and re-sag as Shego shifted her weight. "About last night -"

_Last night._ Drakken lurched away as if the words had burned him. Judging from the sudden heat in his cheeks, they just might have.

Last night was an equation with no solution. The few memories he had of it were wedged down in the folds of his brain, hiding behind neurons, and he couldn't have pried them loose if he'd wanted to.

Which he didn't. He didn't want to remember staggering around HenchCo's basement the way he surely had. He didn't want Shego to remember, either. All the information he had on last night would only convince her that he was a worthless drunk and/or a hopeless idiot. It all built up in him - it had to be clogging his arteries like cholesterol -

Drakken broke his vow of silence and snarled out, "We're not talking about that, Shego!" His head screeched its protest, but he didn't care. Barking orders made him feel a little less like he was going to have a stroke any minute.

"Uh, yeah, we are." Shego's voice was bristly, like she couldn't believe her boss was daring to order her around. "You expect us _not_ to talk about the elephant in the kitchen?"

Drakken knew his lower lip was poking out in a pout, but he couldn't help it. Since when did she call the shots around here? "Can you not get over that?" he demanded. "It was three years ago, and the insurance company fully covered -"

Shego cut him off with a very loud groan, like _she_ was the one in severe pain. "It's a figure of speech, Doc."

"Oh." He hated those things. Why couldn't people just say what they meant instead of dragging pachyderms into it? "Let's pretend I don't know what that means," Drakken said in a smooth voice that he thought covered his confusion quite well. He stole a sneaky little glance at Shego to see if she was impressed.

She wasn't. "It means, Mr. Genius - "

She didn't need to say that sarcastically.

"- something that nobody can ignore, cause it's big and obvious, and pretending it's not there won't fix things."

Curse her for making sense. "And talking about it will?" Drakken grumbled, just for the sake of being difficult.

His sidekick eased herself off his bed and slammed her hands on her hips. "It might." She leaned in closer, and Drakken found himself shrinking back from her sharp eyes. "So - what do you remember about last night?"

It took him a moment to regroup his thoughts - they always got all jumbled after he lost a debate with Shego. No matter how neatly he lined up his memories, though, he was still staring at huge gaps that he didn't know how to fill in. He remembered arriving at HenchCo, falling down the stairs, watching Shego walk away from him, swaggering over to the refreshment table. . . but everything between that and waking up half-dead was a complete blank.

Drakken grunted as he strained his brain, but the pictures and the noises and everything else that should have come to him stayed stuck. He had the mental image of a knotted-up hose, with water bulging like a stuffed stomach because it didn't have anywhere to go.

The only thing that leaked through was the sound of deep chuckles and low voices calling him "Pal," and that didn't make any sense by itself. _Out of context,_ Drakken was pretty sure it was called. "Not. . . not much," he admitted to Shego.

"Try harder," was her heartless answer. Her voice was so cold, it almost made him wish for the pity.

Drakken made a face at her and raised two fingers to each side of his head, feeling the veins pulse. He closed his eyes, accidentally let a sniffle escape, and began rummaging through the contents of his brain. Brushing away cobwebs. Searching folders titled "Failed Evil Schemes" - which was depressingly full - "Kim Possible's Weaknesses" - which was disgustingly empty - and "Prank Calls to Make to Dementor" - which gave him a something-isn't-right tickle.

Squeezing his eyes even tighter, until he was in total blackness, Drakken replayed his one memory. Sure enough, one of the voices that had spoken so nicely to him was high-pitched, with a constant shout and a German accent that never failed to set his teeth on edge. One of the laughing-with-him-instead-of-at-him chuckles was a shrill cackle.

Drakken's eyes flew open. "Dementor!" he cried, hatred heating his gut.

Nothing on Shego's face moved. "You mean Dementor, the table lamp or Dementor, the guy who you can't stand because he's actually competent?"

What was with her today? First elephants, now table lamps. . . "The guy I can't stand because he's actual - hey!" Drakken halted, mid-sentence, and let out an indignant squawk as he realized exactly what he was repeating.

It evidently didn't escape Shego, either. There were times when it was good to see her lips twitch. This wasn't one of them.

"I don't hate him because he's competent," Drakken protested, nearly choking on the word that so many people had stuck a negative prefix on and flung at him. "I hate him because he's so - so - so - "

And just like that, all the words he'd ever known disappeared. Only nonsense noises were left behind to stammer out.

Even if he had had access to his vocabulary, however, Drakken wasn't sure there _were_ words to describe someone like Dementor, someone whose very presence stiffened his neck hairs, someone who could ruin his whole day just by making eye contact with him. Whenever their paths crossed - at villain conventions, in jail, or, most awkwardly, in a top-secret government lab when they were both there to steal the same weapon - Dementor would greet him cheerfully. With a big warm smile, like he thought Drakken was too stupid to see through it.

But Drakken wasn't stupid, and he saw that that oh-so-friendly smile never reached Dementor's eyes. They stayed in nasty little slits, laughing at him just for existing. That always got his pulse pounding and cut off all blood flow to his brain, and he wound up saying or doing the stupidest thing possible. And nobody ever knew it was all Dementor's fault, because they couldn't see his mean eyes. They only saw a mad genius making a fool of himself.

He'd never been able to explain it then, and he knew he wouldn't be able to explain it now, but he had to try. "I mean, he's - he's such a - a -"

_Insult. I need an insult._ Supervillains were supposed to be masters of meanness, and overall, Drakken thought he did pretty darn well, if he had to say so himself. He knew _buffoon_ and _melonhead_ and even _lackwit_, but none of those applied to the current enemy.

No, the whole trouble with Dementor was that he was smart - too smart. Not smarter than Drakken, of course, but better at _looking_ smart, and that made it tough finding a way to insult him.

He snuck a peak at Shego to see if she could be of any help. Words - especially insulting ones - came much easier to her. She was pacing the narrow strip of floor between his bed and the jagged line that indicated a piranha pit.

In spite of everything, Drakken grinned. Sometime in her three-and-a-half years as an evil sidekick, he'd taught her what every mad scientist knew by heart: Pacing made you look that much more dramatic and intimidating.

So dramatic and intimidating, in fact, that Drakken got a little nervous, and when Shego turned around to face him, mouth already forming words, he cringed. She must have known he was looking for a suitable putdown, though, because she thoughtfully suggested, "Such a big fat stinkyhead?"

He felt his smile grow, his chest expand. "That fits perfectly!" he cried. Good old Shego. "He's just a big fat - " Drakken's voice trailed off again - he couldn't remember the last time he'd gotten to finish a sentence - as he noticed the hard shine of amusement on her face.

She'd been messing with him again. And he'd fallen for it. Again.

His hands began their involuntary flapping routine, needing to clutch something. Usually he reached for Sir Fuzzymuffin the Second when that happened, but Shego would never let him live that down. Instead, Drakken reached up and curled his hands into fists around two clumps of hair, hoping the whole time that he'd remembered to hide his teddy someplace safe.

"Shego, Dementor was there last night," he said, changing the subject before he lost what little self-control was keeping him from ripping those fistfuls of hair out. "At the villain party. Last night. He was there." His sentences were coming out choppy and redundant, but he didn't care.

Shego clapped both hands to her cheeks, but she looked about as excited as if she were watching a documentary on the life cycle of the fruit fly. "Gadzooks, that changes everything," she said - completely expressionlessly.

Hmm. She sure was sending some mixed messages here. Drakken tilted his head to see if she would make more sense from a forty-five degree angle.

"I _saw_ Dementor there last night." Shego gave a hissy sigh. "Tell me something I_ don't_ know."

Drakken blinked. "Sea stars eat by expelling their stomachs from their bodies."

Shego evidently was not in awe of his knowledge of the digestive habits of marine echinoderms, because her eyelids dropped to half-mast in that way that always made him squirm inside. "About last night," she finally said. Her words sounded bitten off, pointy like her chin and sharp like her eyes.

"Oh." Was that another one of those figures of speech?

His eyeballs must have been threatening to meet at his nose, because Shego jumped back in with further clarification. "What about Professor Schadenfreude being there?"

Drakken closed his eyes so he could concentrate on the picture forming in his mind. If he was looking at Shego or his Magno-Scope Disruptor Sphere, they might sneak their way into that picture, and he didn't want to contaminate the only evidence he had that last night had even happened. It was fuzzy and lopsided, like a disk had been inserted into his brain's memory drive sideways, but he could still make out Professor Dementor. Smiling warmly, eyes promising friendship, arm sweeping grandly toward the - the -

Drakken sucked in a breath so big, he nearly inhaled his own uvula. _The refreshment table!_

More specifically, the punch bowl.

**()()()()**

**EDITED 11/14 for typos and formatting.  
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	6. Chapter 6

**See, I told ya I'd be updating more frequently! :D Hope you enjoy.**

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The words flew out of Drakken's mouth almost before they had a chance to register in his brain. "Dementor was at the refreshment table - with me! You know how he's usually off, ya know, chillin' with his peeps?" He thrust his hands downward, pinkies extended, like he'd seen a rapper do in a teen magazine once.

Shego didn't give him an answer, and Drakken didn't wait for one. "But last night, he hung out at the refreshment table! I think his henchmen were there, too, but he didn't pay any attention to them. He wanted to talk to - to me!" He paused to gulp in air. "He must have stayed for at least an hour! I think he finally left - things get really blurry right around then. I think I was pretty. . . uh. . . tipsy." Drakken stopped, word supply exhausted, and crossed his fingers and toes that he'd said what he'd meant to say.

Shego must have understood, because her face turned to stone. Not really - that would be very creepy - but it got all hard and stiff. It was like she was so angry, and not just with him, that she couldn't even scream.

The thought that at least some of that scary-blank look was intended for Dementor made him feel safer somehow, and it loosened the knot in the hose. Things were starting to flow again, but they were ugly things that hit him square in the forehead - things he couldn't talk about, but had to. "He was being - nice to me," Drakken admitted in bewilderment.

Shego gave her head another sad shake. "Dementor doesn't _do_ 'nice,'" she said tightly. "Especially not to you."

So she'd seen through Dementor's happy-to-see-you act, too! He was so glad he'd never gotten up the nerve to fire her for ditching him during the Attitudinator fiasco.

Drakken leaned back against his pillow, listening to the lub-DUB, lub-DUB of his heart pounding his ears. His heart was still beating, Shego hated Dementor almost as much as he did, and his brain was starting to function reliably again. It was the first time he'd let himself believe that he might survive being hangedover for the next couple hours.

No sooner had he thought that, though, than an image began to flash obnoxiously in his mind like a strobe light, only lit up for a nanosecond. It took Drakken half a minute to recognize it was his shaking hand holding a glass, and another half a minute to to realize that, with each flash, the glass got emptier and emptier until it started over again at full.

Drakken was finally able to freeze-frame one of the flashes and notice something strange about the glass. Instead of being small and oval like the cups had been last year, it was impressively tall and shiny and shaped like a cylinder, with a skinny little stem on the bottom that shouldn't be able to hold it up - but, thanks to the wonders of physics, it was.

Sweet baby gherkins - was that a wineglass? How had he missed that last night?

Fingers poked at his few weak spots, crying, "Stupid, stupid, stupid!" And when the flashes came again, he spotted a small, yellow person reaching for his empty glass.

The details were starting to click into place, but he didn't feel any triumph at finally remembering. "He proposed a - toast. . . to our newfound friendship." Drakken thought he would be sick just repeating the words.

Shego propped one hand in front of her face and pretended to scribble on it with another finger, like she'd had tiny ballpoint pens installed in her gloves. That would probably come in very handy. "Note to self," she murmured, although it obviously _wasn't_ just a note to self, because she made sure Drakken could hear it too. "Kick Dementor's tail."

That helped a little, but there was still something clogging up the hose - the darkest, hardest thing, the one that he suspected was also the most important. He had another flash of his hand curled around a glass, and this time it was accompanied by a voice that was far too familiar. He couldn't make out any words, but it had the same perky, coaxing tone Mother had always used when she was trying to get him to drink cod liver oil.

He waited for the shivery chills to go away and a semi-coherent thought to replace them before he took a deep breath, the required preface to something you didn't want to say more than once. Shego turned to look at him, just like she was supposed to, and Drakken blurted, "He said my glass was almost empty and that I needed a fresh one to make a toast. He was always telling me to have some more punch."

He had to pry his eyes open with his fingers and hold them like that to keep from having to face the now-complete image that was waiting behind his lids. But Shego didn't give him her usual, "Why are you doing that? You look like you have a thyroid condition?" In fact, she bit down hard on her lip, a face Drakken had seen dozens of times over the years. He was pretty sure it meant she had the urge to cuss but she didn't want to do it front of him, which he appreciated.

She also threw a glance over to the piranha pit, like she wanted to toss Dementor in, even though there weren't currently any piranhas in it. His last school had died when one of his acid baths had leaked into their pool - he still felt bad about that - and he hadn't been able to replace them. Piranhas were so _expensive_ these days - something to do with the destruction of the rainforest - but the Central Headquarters Of Aquatic Supervillany had had a special on extra-large catfish. He'd remembered seeing a documentary on Animal Planet about catfish that got big enough to swallow people whole, so he'd bought a dozen and hoped for the best - or, to be more accurate, the worst. They probably _could_ swallow a little shrimp like Dementor whole, but "catfish pit" just didn't have the same ring to it.

But all thoughts of fish or fishes or whatever the stupid creatures were called vanished when Shego turned back to him. She could have popped a balloon with the point of her chin, and when she spoke there was no expression in it. "He got you drunk."

The words fell with a thud to the pit of Drakken's stomach, which wasn't doing so hot to begin with. So _that_was what the picture in his brain had been trying to tell him.

Heat washed over him, running down to his fingertips. He wondered if that was how Shego felt when her hands started glowing. Dementor hadn't just laughed at him walking into walls and slurring out gibberish. He'd _planned_ for him to get - what was that dreadful term Shego had used? - plastered. And he'd been willing to do anything - including pretend to be Drakken's friend - to make sure that plan succeeded.

It felt strangely like betrayal, though Drakken knew that was ridiculous. Who expected their biggest rival to be nice to them?

But _this_ - this went way beyond rivalry. Even Kim Possible didn't hate him that much, and he was her arch-nemesis. It was her _job_ to hate him.

As cocky and stubborn as she was, if he was honest with himself, Drakken couldn't imagine Kim Possible tricking him into getting drunk. Actually, she'd been very kind of him when the Attitudinator scheme had backfired and left him good last November. Looked at him with soft eyes. Introduced him the buffoon's little pet rodent. Told him everything was going to be okay - and, just for a moment, it had been.

Drakken shook his head and frowned to himself. Maybe it was better to think about Dementor after all.

There had been something so different about Dementor's behavior last night. His "demeanor," his psychology books called it, and wasn't that hard to say? Dementor's demeanor. Demeanor Dementor. Dementor Demeanor dipped a deck of dappled dachshunds. . .

_Get a grip, Drakken!_ He snatched up two handfuls of sheet and brought his newly invented tongue twister to a screeching halt. He always babbled like an idiot, even in his head, when something had him that freaked out.

No, "freaking out" wasn't really villainous. What would Jack Hench have called it? Applicative? Applesauce? Something like that.

Whatever. He needed to get back to the point. And the point was Dementor had been acting weird last night. The genuine pleasure on his face was so different from the phony-baloney, evil-eyed smile he always flashed just to torment Drakken.

He could have fooled a lie detector with that face. And Drakken, who knew better than anyone what a liar the man was, had been fooled, too. Was Dementor that good an actor?

_Or was I just that drunk?_ That was a creepy thought, and he flicked it aside.

Apprehensive! That was what it was! _Apprehensive_! Drakken tried to picture the word spelled out in bright lights in his brain, the way he always did with new fascinating ones, but he was so - so _apprehensive_, the letters formed a scrambled mess. The only ones he could be sure were in the right place were the first _a_ and the last _e_.

The heat began to drain away, leaving behind only the cold, lonely sense that it was frightening to be hated so bad. In spite of the sweat soaking his lab coat, he shivered back to the image of himself getting drunker and sicker, one gulp at a time, while Dementor watched gleefully.

His first impulse was to cry, "What?" But he already knew what, and when and how and where and who. The only thing he didn't know was. . .

"Why?" Drakken asked weakly. The word was followed by a cough, and he could have sworn he heard gravel bounce in his throat.

Shego considered that for a moment. A strange sense of peace swept over Drakken as he observed her, the kind of peace that came when there was nowhere to go but up. No matter what his sidekick said, there was no way she could make him feel any worse.

"Probably just for laughs," Shego finally answered. Her lips did their thing. "Let's face it, you _were_ pretty amusing last night."

So much for peace. Blinding white-hot fury shot through Drakken. He'd never been this angry at anyone before - not his henchmen, not Shego, not even Kim Possible. He hated Professor Dementor for chatting with him like they were the best of buddies, when _really_ all he was doing was waiting for all that non-punch punch he'd gotten Drakken to drink to kick in and make an idiot out of him.

And he hated Dr. Drakken for falling for it.

That was Dementor's way of _entertaining_ himself. Could he not rent a movie like everyone else? Drakken could understand hurting someone because they did something to you first, or because it would get you closer to world domination. But putting them in danger - just for fun?

He really was in danger last night, too. Too much alcohol, he remembered now, could kill you. Poison your liver until it shriveled up and went bye-bye, and you couldn't live without a liver, which was probably why they called it a "live" r in the first place. . .

Drakken could see himself now, liver shrunken to the size of a dried-up pea, stomach turning upside-down, bubbles from it floating up to his chest and piling up until it exploded or maybe stomach acid would splash up his esophagus and burn a gaping hole in his neck.

Those were fates he wouldn't have even wished on James Possible, much less himself. And if Shego hadn't been there last night and done whatever it was that she did. . . well, he didn't even want to think about it.

Drakken sputtered nonsensically for a minute. All reasonable thoughts had vanished, and even if they hadn't none of them could accurately convey what was tangling him up inside. The one tiny section of his brain that wasn't overheating told him to shut up and get a hold of himself, and Drakken was trying to obey when he felt his mouth move and heard someone who sounded a lot like him whimper, "Shego, I don't understand."

Instantly, he wanted to kick himself. He hadn't meant to let that slip out, but his normally lightning-fast reflexes were dull, his head foggy. And he wasn't even drunk anymore, so he could only imagine how much worse it had been the night before. Drakken shuddered again.

Only because she didn't offer any smart-mouthed retorts did he keep going. "Dementor was acting very friendly! He even listened to me talk about my evil plan!"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa." Shego waved her hands through the air. The twitches disappeared and a look of horror took their place. "You told him about your plot?"

"Ye-es," Drakken replied slowly. A vague sense of dread was tugging at him, but he didn't know why. "He thought it was brilliant," he couldn't help adding.

Shego slapped herself in the forehead. "I'm sure he did," she moaned. "Brilliant enough to steal."

_Cannot compute. Please submit different data or try again later._

The gasp that sprang from Drakken's mouth sounded high-pitched and panicky, even to his own ears. For the moment, he was too stunned to get mad. "Not my Teeth of Terror and Octopods of Doom?"

"Yup. You can kiss your little fishy-bot plan goodbye." Shego curled her fingers into a mocking wave.

_That_ was when the shock wore off, and he was so angry it hurt. He wanted to hurl sarcastic, mean words into Shego's face, the way she'd just flung them into his. But his brain had quit thinking in words by this point and was operating solely on pictures.

Pictures of himself waking up in the middle of the night with his most astounding idea ever: Use robotic sea monsters to destroy international communication and trade. Once each of the continents were cut off from each other, he could conquer them all, one by one. Starting with North America, of course, so he could make Drakkcanada his official headquarters.

How he'd jumped out of bed instantly and outlined blueprints on the first piece of paper he could find, which turned out to be last week's newspaper. How he'd gotten to work on the basic structures the very next day, squinting occasionally to see what was scribbled across Garfield's fat orange belly. Shego poking her head in to remind him to eat and him discovering four hours had gone by in what hadn't felt like more than ten minutes.

Slaving over his robots, sharpening the sharks' teeth to gleaming points. Adjusting the heat of the octopuses' laser eyes until it was intense enough to slice right through a plane. How hard he tried to make sure every detail was perfect, arranging the circuits carefully inside special waterproof containers deep inside the beasts, so they couldn't short out, carving faces that would have given a lesser villain nightmares.

He'd still been having a bit of trouble with the octopuses' tentacles. He wanted them to be able to reach out, just like a real octopus's would do, wrap themselves around a ship, and squeeze until it cracked in two. But it wasn't easy finding a metal strong enough to crush an ocean liner, yet supple enough to flex like that without splintering.

If Shego was right and Dementor did copy his plan - if, with his incredible good fortune, he found the right metal first - it would all be ruined. His plot. Whatever was left of his reputation. His ability to look Dementor in the eye and jut out his chin and think, _Yes, I'm smarter than you_.

And here was Shego, acting like it was so trivial, dismissing his scheme with a wave of her hand, not even bothering to call it by its proper name. Did she not _want_ him to succeed? Didn't she realize that being Most Trusted Adviser to the ruler of the entire planet would come with quite a few perks?

A rush of words did fill Drakken's brain then. Not insulting ones - scientific ones whose meanings were as familiar to him as the loops of his own fingerprints. "Those 'little fishy-bots,' as you call them," he said, injecting just the right amount of anger into his voice so that he sounded foreboding but not out of control, "are the result of precision design and complex engineering! Besides, octopuses are mollusks, not fish."

"It's 'octopi,' and I know full well what they are," Shego replied with sickening. . . calmness? Calm? Calmth?

"No, you don't!" Drakken heard himself shriek. "You don't know _anything_!"

Before the words were even all the way out, Drakken knew they weren't even close to true and would probably earn him a fiery-fingered slap. It didn't matter, though, as long as they knocked Shego down a few pegs.

But they didn't. She actually smiled, though her eyes were shooting sparks. Why did people smile at him when it was obvious what they _really_ wanted to do was wring his neck?

"Hmm, let's see here." Shego tapped her cheek, pretending to be deep in thought. "Should I comment on your maturity, or just stick to fact that _I_ can tell the difference between punch and booze?"

That was the last straw. Drakken could have sworn he felt a spring pop out of place somewhere inside him. "I don't care!" he cried, voice cracking on what was meant to be a growl - and with that, he threw himself down onto his stomach, face buried in his pillow, head and heart somehow pounding out of sync.

He wasn't crying, not technically. No tears fell from his eyes, but big gulps of air were ripped from the lungs and came out in little squeaky sounds, and his shoulders started to shake even though he was commanding them to stay strong. He didn't care how childish it made him look. Everyone already thought he was a moron, so what difference did it make?

The unfairness of it all overwhelmed him. Him getting drunk. Dementor stealing his plan. No one caring. Everybody would flip out and hate Drakken if _he_ ever took one of _Dementor's_ ideas, but _noooo_-

_Like when you stole his teleporter?_ a tiny something asked in the very back of his mind.

Ugh. His conscience. How he hated the thing. Sometimes it was just a little nagging tug deep down in his gut, like when he caught Kim Possible in a death trap. But other times - like when he had forgotten to make sure his mother had a space helmet before he went ahead with his scheme to suck all the oxygen out of the atmosphere - it was like his guardian angel had reached down from heaven and slapped him across the face. It was kind of pathetic, really - who had ever heard of an evil megalomaniac with a functioning conscience?

Too bad a doctor couldn't just open him up and remove it the way they did with infected tonsils or a ruptured appendix. Drakken wasn't especially keen on the thought of being cut open, but it would be worth it if it would get rid of that little whispery thing that was probably keeping from achieving global conquest, and maybe get him some respect from his fellow evildoers -

_Respect._ Drakken let that word spell itself out in bright lights, as brilliant and shiny as it deserved to be.

He knew he'd spelled it right because somebody had written a song for that very purpose. He'd sung it for Shego one day to remind her that he was the big cheese around here and deserved to be treated as such. Even throwing in a little break-dancing routine - _make it fun, and they'll learn_, that parenting magazine in the dentist's waiting room had said - but he'd strained something in his knee and had to hobble around on crutches for three weeks. The pity had been plain on Kim Possible's face when she saw him trying to limp around her in his usual predatory circle. No respect there, either.

Come to think of it, it had been so long since he had last had respect - had he _ever_ had it? - he wasn't sure he would know what it looked like if he saw it. He knew what it _wasn't_, though. The faces of Kim Possible and Dementor and Shego and even the buffoon and his naked weasel flashed through Drakken's mind.

He thought he'd earned some last night, but - his nose was tingly and he wanted to snuffle, but he pushed a hard snort through it instead - of course, it had been fake. Nothing about last night was real, except for all the stupid stuff he must have done. Drakken couldn't recall _exactly_ what that stuff was, but he did remember the nasty laughter and the flaming-red cheeks that always went along with him humiliating himself.

The awful images rose up as if he'd called for them. Men fighting in bars, pausing occasionally from beating each other up to swing wildly at the air, because they were seeing double and aimed for the wrong one. Dumbo hiccuping bubbles through his trunk as he watched the pink elephants march by. Sitcom people tap-dancing on their coffee tables or announcing to the entire world who they were in love with, thereby ruining any chance that they would ever get together.

They looped through his head two, three, four times, and by the fourth trip something was different. Each worthless drunk now had Drakken's face. (It looked especially strange on the elephant.)

He figured he could rule out being in a fight. He hurt bad to enough to have been, but Shego wouldn't have waited this long to lay into him for it. Too bad, because the idea of smashing Dementor's face in was very appealing right now.

But the other things - those made "maybe, maybe, maybe"s dart through his mind and crush his chest, and suddenly he had to know for sure. Finding out might hurt too, but the not-knowing would surely drive him crazy.

Drakken lifted his face cautiously from the pillow to see Shego still hovering over him. She looked curious, amused, maybe a little ticked off, but not mad. That gave him the strength to flick his tongue across his lips and ask, "Did I dance on the table?"

Drakken cringed at the sound of his own voice. He sounded less like a nightmare-inducing villain and more like a bullfrog with a bad case of the flu.

For half a second, a smile danced in Shego's eyes. "No," she replied, and she didn't _sound_ too mad, either.

At least there was that. Drakken tried to nod, but he might as well have attempted to topple Stonehenge with his bare hands. There was a terrible pressure on his head, squeezing it so hard he was surprised his brains weren't oozing out his ears.

"Did I put a lampshade on my head?" His voice came out stronger this time.

"No." Shego gave her head a firm shake - exaggeratedly, like she was imitating him.

Drakken shot her a half-hearted grimace, just so she'd know that hadn't escaped him, and scowled down at his hands. They looked tiny and pale against his maroon sheet, like little blue puddles on a giant. . . red. . . thing. He'd never realized before how _small_ they were, the fingers thin and almost dainty like they belonged to a little girl rather than a ruthless megavillain. Drakken quickly shoved them under the covers before Shego could notice them, too. It would just be another thing for her to treat with that blasted disrespect.

"Did I confess my undying love for anyone?" He almost didn't ask that question, because it was so improbable. If he were undyingly in love with someone it was as much news to him as to anyone else. He couldn't even remember the last woman who had brought up thoughts of flowers and jewelry and heart-shaped boxes of chocolate to be split after a romantic candlelit dinner -

No, wait. Yes he could. DNAmy.

Drakken felt his shoulders stiffen. DNAmy, the one who had strung him along and broken his heart. She'd taught him a valuable lesson, too: relationships needed to be taken slowly. The next time he fell for a woman, no matter how perfect she seemed to be, he was going to wait _at least_ a week before proposing to her.

But even though he hated her now - couldn't stand the sight of her - well, that sight still made his heart skip a beat and then sag at the edges. It was hard to look at DNAmy, her cute chubby face and the soft little hands that made his seem enormous, without remembering the wonderful day he had been in love and conquering the world seemed unimportant in comparison.

What if he wasn't "over her," as the kids today said? And what if he'd announced that to every single villain gathered in HenchCo's basement?

All those panicked thoughts ran through Drakken's mind in about five seconds, before Shego gave him the smirk that always signaled impending doom and said, "Well - you told me you loved me -"

Drakken's stomach heaved in disbelief, but Shego held up a wait-a-minute hand. "- but you told the hovercraft you loved _it_, too, so I'd take that with a grain of salt."

He latched on to that last word, a compound he recognized. "Sodium chloride," he mumbled, just to steady himself.

Shego rolled her eyes. "Sure, whatever floats your boat." The sarcasm in her voice hardened into sternness. "No, basically, you just talked way too loud and laughed way too much. And then you barfed."

Well, that wasn't very exciting. Embarrassing, sure, but nothing that screamed "LOOK HOW INTOXICATED I AM!"

Drakken pulled his knees back up to his chest and began to rock himself, out of thoughtfulness this time, not despair. He was perfectly capable of doing all those things when he was - somber? Sobering? What was the word for un-drunk? Maybe no one had thought there was anything weird about his behavior last night, and he wouldn't have to do a massive memory wipe after all.

"So - nobody even knew I was drunk?" he asked. A small flicker of hope crept in, as thin the stream of light that was tormenting his eyes. That would mean no new ammunition for Dementor and his boys.

Shego's brows pinched together. "Of course they knew you were drunk. It was kinda hard to miss."

So much for hope. So much for not needing to perform the memory wipe. If only he could remember where he'd put that amnesia gas. . .

"Unless you're DNAmy, that is," Shego continued with a snicker. "I don't think she had a clue _what_ was going on."

_Thank you, God._

Shego plopped herself down on the edge of his bed and leaned in closer. A little too close, as far as Drakken was concerned, especially considering she didn't look happy with him. "And you ruined everyone's evening," she informed him.

"Really?" Drakken asked skeptically. That would have been quite a feat, when he stopped and thought about how many people usually came to Hench's gatherings. Hench himself, of course, Dementor and his henchmen - he usually brought about six - Killigan, probably the Seniors (though they didn't appear in any of his memories), (_shudder_) DNAmy, Monkey Fist. . . not to mention the amateur thugs and one-note villains who always showed up - ten was a low estimate -

Drakken did some quick mental math. That was at _least_ twenty-three evenings he would have had to sabotage.

"Yes, really." Shego gave him half of what he assumed was probably meant to be a smile. It was hard to tell with Shego sometimes. "I don't think anybody really stuck around too long with that trash can."

"Trash can?" Drakken repeated in bewilderment. "What trash ca - oh." Now he remembered. "_That_ trash can." The one he'd bent over and emptied his belly into, the one he'd clung to for dear life because the ground was threatening to come up to meet him.

It was starting to come back to him, and remembering made the muscles around his mouth jerk. Drakken glanced down, relieved to see that their bucket (_his_ bucket; Shego had never once used it) was propped against the side of his bed, just a few feet away from where Shego's feet dangled. Not that he needed it right now. Still, it would be nice to have it, just in case. . .

He closed his eyes and forced himself to consider more pleasant matters. Like the fact that he'd ruined twenty-three people's evenings without even trying. That felt good - in an evil way, of course. Jack Hench's little doohickey - and it _must_ have been a piece of junk if Dr. Drakken couldn't be bothered to remember its name - had to have been malfunctioning when it declared him a playground bully. He was a regular force of destruction! The thought brought a smile to his cracked lips.

It disappeared about five seconds later, though, when Shego turned to him and glared so hard he was surprised she didn't burn a hole in his forehead. No one could glare like Shego. Maybe not even him. "You sure ruined mine," she added.

A low growl started deep in Drakken's throat. He was about to unleash it, along with a retort that he hadn't been having a blast himself, but something stopped him. Could have been the fact that the pressure had mutated into a sensation similar to being zapped with a laser, right in the forehead, over and over. Or maybe it was because the words were muttered exactly the same way Drakken would have grumbled them if the prickles were stabbing at him. Maybe, just maybe, Shego was nasty when she got prickly too.

"Really?" he said again, this time in the nicest voice he could muster. Okay, so it still sounded like a hibernating bear that had been woken up in January. But between the hangover and hating everybody in the world (except possibly Shego), he thought he did pretty darn well.

"Yeah." Shego did not appear overly touched by his concern. "I was off doing my own thing - "

Right - she'd left him and gone off by herself, though he wasn't sure why. Shego was so good at being his sidekick, it was hard to picture her doing anything else. Why would anyone _want _to be alone, especially at a party?

Maybe she'd wandered off to play one of those virtual-reality, battle-to-the-death games that were supposed to help you practice your fighting skills. Like Shego _needed_ practice! She always won those games, and Drakken was glad because he knew he'd go beyond-mad-scientist mad watching Shego die, even if it was only virtual. "What thing?" he asked tightly.

There must have still been an edge to his voice, because the glare didn't let up. "I thought I'd just hang out somewhere, maybe try one of those battle simulations -"

He knew it.

"- find some other villainesses to chat with." The words hissed out between Shego's teeth like steam.

What did women do together that was so important? The only things Drakken could up with were trying on makeup and giggling about men, and he couldn't see Shego enjoying either one of those, at least not for very long. It was baffling, but, he realized, he didn't particularly care.

Especially not once it occurred to him - Shego hadn't wanted to be alone. She just didn't want to be with _him_. Drakken felt a spark of anger, but it was washed away in the sadness and the jealousy and all the other itchy things that had him eying the bucket again.

The steam turned acidic. "Guess what I had to devote my night to, instead? Dragging your sorry carcass home, helping you stand up, trying to get you to walk in a straight line, waiting outside the bathroom for you to finish upchucking, and making sure you didn't need to go to the hospital."

Oh. That didn't sound very fun. Almost as not-fun as being the one whose body was so overwhelmed by alcohol it was going haywire. If he could have spared a brain cell to feel sorry for her, he would have.

That was twenty-_four_ evenings he'd ruined, and Drakken didn't feel good - or even evil - about spoiling Shego's. He just felt sort of dirty, like he'd just discovered his scalp was infested with fleas. He wanted to say something. Tell her he was sorry. But the words got stuck in his throat, next to the little bit of pride he had left.

He wasn't sure how much good it would have done, anyway. Shego's face had frozen over. He suddenly wanted to see the happy twitches around her mouth again.

There must be a way to show her that he hadn't meant to cause so much trouble - that, in fact, he'd gone out of his way _not_ to do anything dumb. And then, a brilliant idea surfaced, tucked inside a half-formed memory from the night before.

Drakken had to wait the required 1.34 minutes for the concept, the image, and the idea to morph into something he'd be able to get out of his mouth. He'd always wished he could just reach inside his brain and pull out the picture he had in his head, show it to Shego and not have to explain anything. Communication would have been so much easier without those darn words getting in the way.

While he waited, he twiddled his fingers under the covers. Did push-ups with his eyebrow. Tried to massage the sides of his head, but the ache was too big to be soothed by his tiny fingers.

Finally his picture-to-word translation was complete, and he could speak. "Shego," Drakken coughed out around a throat full of oozy slime and sharp-edged pebbles, "I tried really hard not to make myself sick at the refreshment table this year." His hands swooped through the air in their eagerness to convey his urgency. "I only had one brownie!"

Drakken paused for effect and waited for pride to glimmer in Shego's eyes, the way it did when he remembered not to do stuff like tell Kim Possible his plan or put a self-destruct button on one of his doom rays. It didn't. The stony-cold look went away, but it was replaced by the pity, mixed with disgust, like he really _did_ have fleas. Drakken scratched at his head absentmindedly. That was the power of suggestion for you.

"Dr. D." His nickname was accompanied by a heavy sigh. "That just makes it worse."

Drakken's mind tied itself into another knot. "What makes what worse?" It took all his strength to snap that back, rather than give in to the whimper that threatened in his throat.

Shego rubbed her temples, though he was sure her head couldn't hurt an eighth as much as his did. "Drinking on an empty stomach," she explained. "It makes you get drunk _way_ faster."

She sounded like she was scolding him for not being an expert on the horrible beverage impersonating fruit punch, and he would have lashed out at her for it if he hadn't been so weary. It figured the only time he remembered to use self-control, it would up working against him.

Still, it made sense from a scientific perspective - even drinking water on an empty stomach made him feel kind of funny. That was the only perspective that mattered, Drakken reminded himself, shoving away the clogged-up feeling in his throat and the fizzy one in his nose.

He tried to tilt his head to get a better look at Shego, but it just lolled uselessly on his neck. "So, what are the other variables?" he chirped, surprising even himself with his cheerfulness.

Shego suddenly looked very tired. "Variables?"

"For getting drunk. What else determines how drunk you get?" Drakken put on his most serious face. "I want to know."

He never thought he'd want to know more about the substance responsible for his current misery, but the effects alcohol had on the human body - a hypothetical body, not his - was a scientific process. Unlike his emotions, which obeyed no rules, followed no pattern, conformed to no standard. Scary as alcohol might have been, it was a much safer topic than why the shame was thickening in his throat.

Besides, the more he knew about it, the less likely it was to happen again, and Shego had the info he needed. Every now and then, through some strange twist of fate, someone might know something before you did, and when that happened it was imperative - a good word - to absorb their information as quickly as possible so you could remain the smartest person around. No one ever died from too much knowledge - unless it was of another country's military tactics or something.

Shego rolled her eyes up so far Drakken was sure she could see into her own brain. (She _had_ to reach him how to do that.) "Well, let's see." She was using her teacher-tone again. "Men can drink more than women -" She held up a hand to cut off the words he wasn't planning to say anyway. "As a general rule. Don't let it go to your head."

Her voice had hardened, so that she sounded like a _cranky_ teacher, and that bothered him. "I wasn't going to, Shego!" he growled. Didn't mean to growl, but his new, gravelly voice couldn't help it. "Just because my cousin is a male chauffeur doesn't mean _I_ am!"

"Chauvinist."

"Eh?"

"Never mind." Shego shuddered a few times, like she was shaking off thoughts of Eddy, and held up a fist. Drakken instinctively shrank back, even though his sidekick tended to fight more with kicks and plasma bursts than punches.

But she uncurled a finger and held it up straight, with a purpose, the way people did when they used their hands to check off items on a list. He let his shoulders relax.

"How often you drink," Shego began. "Drink _alcohol_," she added before Drakken could say that he drank all the time, that dehydration was no fun. "That affects it. So does -" she unfolded a second finger - "how fast you drink it." Another finger came unfurled. "And what you weigh has something to do with it, too."

She said it all very casually, not in a firm factual manner at all. All of those facts, though, fit with the little he'd read about alcohol and how it was absorbed into the bloodstream.

They were fascinating, but it was getting tough to keep his eyes open. His lids felt like they had hundred-pound weights tied to them. They sagged lower and lower, until Shego's face was replaced by colorful explosions, like the remnants of a particularly interesting dream.

"Yoo-hoo." Shego's hand waved back and forth in front of him like a windshield wiper, sweeping away the fireworks. "Can I ask you to remain conscious while I'm talking to you?"

Drakken glared at her through his droopy-lidded eyes. About seventeen indignant replies skipped through his mind, but he was too overcome with fatigue to say anything more than, "I hurt."

Shego did not seem particularly moved. "Well, YOU were the one who wanted a science lesson."

Phew. For a minute there, he'd thought she was going to say, "Well, YOU were the one who went and got drunk," and then he'd have to yell at her and he didn't think his head could stand that.

"Now, I'm willing to bet you don't drink very often." Shego touched the first finger and gave him that all-knowing glance. "Am I right?"

Drakken managed a very-tiny nod. Something had stolen his words again, but it wasn't frustration this time. There was no itch in his chest, no fire in his belly, only the bone-deep tiredness that told him there was no point in fighting. It was the way he felt sometimes when Kim Possible appeared in his doorway, flanked by the National Guard - a sensation that never lasted very long but that scared the bejeebers out of him every time.

"And I _know_ you drained your glasses in one chug last night." Shego moved on to the second finger. "You always do."

He unexpectedly let out a nervous laugh, even though nothing about this was funny. Ironic, maybe - who would have ever thought that, out of his little things Mother called "quirks," _that_ one would get him in trouble? - but not funny. Still, maybe Shego was right. Maybe you had to laugh to keep from crying.

"As for your weight - " Shego's brows hiked.

So much for that hypothetical person. It was all very personal now. The chuckle died in Drakken's throat as he glanced down at his slender frame. No - "lean" sounded more masculine. But no matter how deep his voice was, he didn't feel very macho right now.

Shego gave him a quick scan with her eyes and he puffed his chest out, just a bit, to make up for how the shame had deflated it. "You're. . . what, 160 pounds?" she asked casually.

"Give or take," Drakken replied equally casually. It had been 155 at his last checkup, but she didn't need to know that.

Shego drummed her fingers on the bedspread as if she was processing that. "See, that's not exactly puny - "

"You're darn right it's not!" Drakken interrupted. His voice came out somewhere between a snarl and a cough.

Shego acted like she hadn't heard. "- but it's not real big, either."

She said it like it was a fact, not an insult, but Drakken could feel his biceps shrinking anyway. He set his chin and met her eyes and hoped his glare was as cold and blank as hers.

"So, let's just say the odds weren't exactly in your favor," Shego finished dryly. With a flick of her wrist, that conversation was over.

But the one in his head wasn't. His thoughts were screaming Shego-like things at him so loudly, Drakken wanted to cover his ears, even though he knew that wouldn't help.

He was too miserable to argue with any of them, so he settled for frowning at his accomplice. "Did I mention my head hurts?" he said. His voice curled up at the ends, because it really _did_ hurt. Thrummed like a fingernail that had been cut too short. Drakken let go of his sheet and groped at his forehead, fingers sinking into the wrinkles he always frowned over his nose when when he had a headache.

"Don't whine, Doc," was Shego's only response.

That time Drakken _did_ clap his hands over his ears, but not quick enough to muffle his own yelp. "Don't say _wine_, Shego!" he pleaded.

He thought he heard her chuckle and mutter something about it being spelled differently, but he didn't care. It didn't _sound_ differently, and that was all that mattered to the instincts that had just been taught to hate that word.

Drakken kept his ears covered, because it just felt safer that way. So when his mouth open - of its own volition - he almost didn't hear himself say, "I bet you think I'm really stupid for getting drunk accidentally, don't you?"

The instant the sentence was out, Drakken wished he could grab it and pop it back into his mouth. Or become a judge so he could order that comment struck from the record. Strucken? Stricked? Strack? In the grand scheme of things, it didn't matter, he knew. Still, it was so frustrating to have the right word dangling just out of your reach -

"Yeah," Shego replied without missing a beat.

Before that could even start to hurt, her face changed. She didn't smile but, for a second, her chin stopped pointing at him like an accusing finger. "But not half as stupid as if you'd done it on purpose."

Drakken's jaw dropped, nearly scraping his chest. "People do this on _purpose_?" he asked weakly. How could that be? The spinny, pukey feeling of certain death - you might as well stick your head in a hydrolic press.

This time, Shego did give him half a smile. A wry one. (He'd read that word in a book once, and it was _perfect_ for Shego.) "Hard to believe, isn't it?"

Drakken nodded, making his bulky boulder of a head feel awfully light, and found himself pitching forward onto his sheets. With cracks and creaks and moans - and the help of someone else's strong, steady hands - he managed to push himself back up to a sitting position.

He was trying to breathe around the pain when Shego went, "Ugh," and looked at him sharply for no reason Drakken could figure out. He tried to sneer back at her, but his facial muscles were too tired to contort into that mask that kept everyone out. All he could manage was a cross-eyed squint that didn't help his head any.

"'Kay, look, look - I wasn't supposed to get into this big long conversation with you," was all Shego offered in the way of explanation. "I was just gonna ask if you've learned your lesson and then go home."

His _lesson_? Anger squeezed Drakken's chest tight. Like he was some naughty child who'd broken into the cookie jar? If anyone needed to be taught a lesson, it was Dementor for thinking it was a hilarious to get someone drunk, or Hench for not labeling his dangerous substances. All _he'd_ done was gulp a few glasses of what he'd had no reason to suspect wasn't fruit punch.

"And what lesson would that be, Shego?" Drakken asked it as coldly as he could, but he sensed he wouldn't be able to keep his temper in his check for too long. His throat ached from holding back the scream that he knew wouldn't do him any good.

For only about the third time since he'd met her, Shego appeared at a loss for words. Her mouth drooped downward in doubt, something he hadn't even known she could experience. "Well - I was gonna say 'Don't get drunk,' but since you didn't even know you were drinking alcohol -"

At least she remembered _that_.

"- I guess the moral here is to know what you're drinking - _before_ you drink it."

That didn't sound like a scolding. That was just just good advice from a friend. The angry burning in Drakken's throat fizzled away, his urge to kick and scream and punch things overpowered by exhaustion. He wasn't used to anything being stronger than his fury - maybe it should have scared him, but he was too tired for fear, either.

Drakken opened his eyes as wide as he could, big and sincere, so Shego would see that he didn't want this to happen again any more than she did. Probably less. "Yes!" he agreed. "Next time somebody offers me a suspicious drink, I'll put it on a slide and examine it on a molecular level before a drop of it goes in my mouth!" He flung his arms out dramatically and glanced up at his sidekick, waiting for her acknowledgment of his latest clever idea.

But instead, he saw eyes rolling and a smirk starting and fingers tapping impatiently on her thighs - amusement in danger of turning to disgust. "Right," she said, a little too chipper. . . ly. "And should you not happen to have access to a microscope, you can bring it to _me_."

Drakken felt his face light up. So she _did_ want to help him! "You can be my wine taster!" he cried gleefully. "All the great rulers have them!"

Shego did the slice-the-air thing with her hands. "That is so _not_ what I just said!"

"Whatever." They'd discuss that later, when he had the strength to argue. "Point being, if it turns out to be alco - " Drakken stopped. The pinch in his throat wouldn't even let him say it.

"If it turns out to be - that stuff," he corrected himself, "then I'll know to toss it."

Shego looked at him like he was some cute little kid insisting the Loch Ness Monster lived in his swimming pool. "Yeah - _or_ - you'll know to drink it in moderation," she said in a phony-happy voice. Even _that_ one reminded Drakken of a teacher - one of those evil teachers that tormented kids but made sure to smile and act nice when parents were around.

"Moderation," Drakken repeated. He ran the word through his brain a few times, but he couldn't find the compartment where it belonged. Maybe breaking it down would help. "Mod. Er. Ra. Tion." Nope. Still nothing.

"Mod. Er. Ra. Tion." Shego said it super-slowly, like maybe she was making fun of him. "It means you don't have too much of something.

She didn't add "I know it's a novel concept to you, Dr. D.," but he could hear it anyway. Her eyes glinted, erasing the "maybe."

"Nnnegh getttt - Shego!" was the closest thing he had to a retort. Not exactly coherent, and it didn't have the same effect when it came out in a whispery croak, but he just couldn't scream at this point.

Shego didn't appear to have heard it at all. "So, drinking it moderation would be getting a glass and sipping from it now and then. You know, instead of gulping down four glasses in an hour and getting so smashed you talk to table lamps." Contempt poked through every syllable - or something metaphorical like that.

A long, deep pang went through Drakken. He should be used to it by now, he thought numbly, Shego poking and prodding at his raw places. But whenever she mocked his foiled schemes or malfunctioning machinery or his tendency to make up words because the right ones always seemed to go on vacation just when he needed them most and leave him sputtering like a confused motorboat, it stung like it was the first time.

Still, there was something else about this particular sting, something that went beyond _Shego's making fun of me_ or _What's with the obsession with table lamps, anyway?_ Something familiar. Shame again, with a bit of good-old-fashioned guilt thrown in for good measure.

For the third time that morning, Drakken flashed back to a time he'd rather forget, to a really old, really girly book they'd had to read in eighth-grade English. The memory brought on a scowl. Contrary to what the poster hanging in the school library said, books were not his friends. He could _read_ just fine, but books had hundred of pages and thousands of words on every page - every time he opened one, it all turned to alphabet soup. He was able to recognize letters, make out a word here and there, but he had no idea what it was trying to tell him. He had trouble with his textbook - except science and, usually, math - but fiction was even worse, because there were no diagrams or glossaries or indexes to make it easier to understand. By eighth grade, most of them didn't even have pictures anymore.

_This_ book, with its words whose meanings he knew but that all bled together in written form, and the print so tiny he practically needed bifocals to read it, was even harder than most. He'd barely been able to finish it, and when he had, he put it out of his mind entirely. Never thought of it again.

Until now, when a scene from it was clearly unfolding itself in Drakken's brain as if he'd read it yesterday. A little girl had gone over to her friend's house for a tea party, which made them both feel very grown-up. He wasn't sure why - all the girls _he_ knew had stopped playing tea party in third grade. It wasn't really a _tea_ party, for that matter, because they didn't serve tea. He remembered it taking place a long time ago, so maybe they'd still had that tax on tea.

Anyway, the hostess served her guest what they both thought was fruit punch or something, and it was so good she just kept having more and more. But it turned out to be wine, and after three glasses, she was flat-out drunk.

He'd laughed at the time. Now Drakken shuddered for the poor girl. She'd staggered home with everything spinning around her and no idea what was wrong with her, and he knew how miserable she must have been.

Her mother was understandably very upset. She marched herself right over to the friend's house, because there were no phones back then, and started yelling at the friend's mother - well, she wasn't _biologically_ her mother, but she loved her and took care of her, and that made her something very close.

Then _she_ got mad and started yelling back. What was it she'd said?

_"Three tumblers full of anything would have made her sick even if it was just. . ."_ Whatever they'd thought it was. _"If I had a child who was so greedy she'd drink three glasses of anything, I'd sober her up with a good spanking!"_

The words went straight through Drakken. He would have said it was an honest mistake, no one's fault, but, no, apparently, apparently the accidentally-drunk girl was to blame.

And she'd been right. Little old ladies were _always_ right, at least in books. Drakken stared down at his lap and tried in vain to smooth one of the dozens of wrinkles out of his lab coat, something sour forming on his tongue.

What if she _was_ right? If he hadn't been such a greedy-guts and didn't drink so much punch, would he not have gotten drunk? His heart began to pound out _her-fault-her-fault-her-fault, your-fault-your-fault-your-fault_, smashing against his temples and making him feel ugly inside.

_No, of course not_, Drakken told himself sternly. _That's just stupid._ It would be like blaming someone who was out taking a stroll for getting run over by a car that was on the sidewalk instead of the street.

Plus, if it was his own piggish fault, Shego would have already laid into him for it. She wasn't the type to mince words - more like grind them up and fry them and serve them on a platter with lemon wedges. And why was it that he could remember almost word-for-word a speech he'd read in a book twenty-eight _years_ ago when he forgot where he'd put his goggles five seconds after he set them down?

Obviously, the notion was beyond ridiculous, but it was hard to banish it completely. What if Jack Hench didn't _need_ to label his alcoholic beverages, because anybody who was enough of a glutton to down four glasses of anything would get what was coming to them? What if - _her-fault-your-fault, her-fault-your-fault_ - a you-deserve-it lurked in Shego's thoughts, behind those eyes that gave nothing away?

It all pressed in on him until Drakken had to come back with, "Ha-ha-ha, Shego. That's easy for you to say! _You've_ probably never been drunk!"

He waited for her to lift her lip at him and sniff, "You got THAT right."

Instead, Shego leaned her head back and fixed her gaze on his calendar, looking nothing like the girl who could knock out men twice her size and demolish a building quicker than any wrecking ball. When she spoke, her voice was faraway, like she was having a flashback of her own, and it didn't sound like she was enjoying it any more than Drakken had his.

"Mildly tipsy. Once. Hated it." Shego locked eyes with him. For once, hers revealed something, but before Drakken could figure out what, it was gone. "Vowed never to do it again."

He gaped, not believing his ears. He couldn't picture Shego being anything but fierce and practical and in-control - three things that he'd discovered were impossible to be while you were drunk.

But then, it _would_ explain how she knew so much about alcohol. Shego wasn't really the scientific type, so Drakken had always figure she was born knowing these things. But letting her know that would never do.

He studied his sidekick skeptically to show her he didn't automatically believe everything she told him. "So, this 'moderation'. . .has it been proven scientifically possible?" His voice came out cool and level, and he wasn't even trying too hard. That was what research did for him - unless he was researching cheerleading or rockets or something else that reminded him of someone he despised.

Shego kind of snorted. "Uh, yeah. It's what I do."

Of course it was. She always knew how to do _everything_ in a way that wouldn't backfire on her.

Still, the very-recent memory of Shego's voice drifted through Drakken's sore head. _Hated it. Vowed never to do it again._ Apparently she'd had to learn the hard way, too, though evidently not as hard as _his_ way.

Where would she have gotten alcohol anyway? In college, like him? Had she even _gone_ to college? She hadn't seemed old enough to have completed it that first day she'd shown up on his doorstep, but she had to have finished because she was always making fun of him for dropping out. He'd heard you could take classes online now, though, which he just might do if he wasn't so busy conquering the world. . .

It was hardly the time for a revelation, but Drakken realized it anyway - that even though Shego was practically his family, he barely knew anything about her life before she came to work for him. The few things he _had_ found out hadn't come from her: She used to be a superhero. She had four brothers who still _were_ superheroes. And, because of that, she hated them so much she wouldn't even talk about them. That didn't make much sense to Drakken; a nice angry rant always made him feel better.

But Shego wasn't a ranter - at least not about that - so her past was a complete blank to him. He didn't know what she'd wanted to major in when she was in high school or who her best friend was in junior high or wanted she wanted to be when she was five.

Another pang prodded at Drakken, not as pointed as the shame, but thicker - disappointment, perhaps, or maybe just plain old sadness. He wished he'd known her when she was a little girl, so he could have protected her from whatever it was that made her so mean now.

And he wanted to hunt down whoever had given her alcohol and throw them to his sharks.

Drakken shook himself - ugh, and immediately wished he hadn't. This was no time to be getting all sentimental, not while Shego was waiting to hear his thoughts on the subject of moderation. He wasn't sure exactly what he was going to say, but he prepared his firmest voice, so that whatever it was would clearly be the final word on the matter.

_Modd. Er. Ray. Tion._ The letters loomed six inches tall in his mind's eye, but they didn't sparkle the way words were supposed to when he laid them out plain. Maybe he hadn't spelled it right.

Or maybe it was because he was picturing himself sipping from a glass of wine, staring down at its ominous contents, knowing full well the power it had to turn you into a dopey, halfwit version of yourself. Made his legs feel unsteady, and Drakken knew if he'd been standing up, his knees would have buckled and taken him to the ground.

As it was, the wobble crept up his throat in ripples and turned his firm voice into a nervous twitter, erasing the speech he'd just begun to rehearse. His mouth was already moving, though, and Drakken found himself grabbing the first words he could catch and tossing them out, hoping that they were coherent. "No, Shego," he sputtered. "I never want to drink evil fruit punch - ever again!"

Shego surprised him with a chuckle. "Evil fruit punch - man, you are such a kick, Doc."

Her lips were doing their twitchy thing. It wasn't salaaming at his feet, but he'd take what he could get.

"That's probably not a bad idea, actually," she continued, and Drakken managed a tired smile because that was the closest thing to a compliment he'd heard all morning. "I don't know about you, but I do _not_ want this to happen again."

"Because I ruined your evening," Drakken said completely flatly. Okay, mostly flatly, with a ten-percent chance of quivers.

"Because you ruined my evening," Shego replied with equal-or-greater flatness. Jaw set, face smooth, she looked like Shego again. "For one thing, I was looking forward to the Seniors' company, and do you think I got to spend any time with them?"

It didn't sound like the sort of question he was actually supposed to answer, but Drakken guessed, "No?" anyway, just because this calm type of anger was so unnerving. At least when her pitch shot up and her hands glowed and a vein pulsed in her forehead, he knew to stay out of her way.

"Ding-ding-ding. We have a winner." Shego shook her head, hair swaying. Why did she have to have so much hair? Made him dizzy. "No, I didn't, because by the time they showed up, you were already -"

He plastered his hands over his ears so he wouldn't hear "plastered" again. One last memory snuck up on him and punched him in the face.

Him and Shego - Shego and he - whatever - them making their way down the sidewalk outside of HenchCo. Her walking, him stumbling, leaning heavily on her and weaving his way around squares of concrete that were shifting under his feet. Shego abruptly stepped off to the side, causing Drakken to nearly fall on his face as he followed her, to let two figures coming from the opposite direction pass.

But they didn't pass. They halted as if Drakken and Shego were stop signs and stood there investigating them to see if everything was all right.

Even with his bleary, drunken vision, Drakken recognized the stooped shoulders clad in a fancy red European suit, and the hulking ones right next to them. The Seniors.

He couldn't get his eyes to focus, but somehow he saw Senior's face as clearly as if he'd been highlighted in neon yellow. It was kind and concerned and not the least bit suspicious, which only made Drakken feel guiltier for some reason.

Anyway, Senior asked what was wrong, while Junior stood there, looking confused and Drakken struggled to keep his balance, and Shego told him - what _had_ she told him? Anxiety lapped at his gut. There were so many things she could've been saying, none of them good, all of them true.

Suddenly, Drakken could see the lock on a shower stall jittering, watch Carl fling open the door, hear rough, middle-school-boy laughter mixed with his own little-girl shrieks as he tried to cover himself with the curtain. He was open and vulnerable, exposed to the world.

He strained to hear his partner-in-crime, but his ears didn't register anything except a dull roar. He enlarged the image to see if he could read her lips, but that pixelated everything like a computer with cheap graphics. What he knew without seeing, though, was that Senior was absorbing every detail - not only of Shego's explanation, but also of Drakken's sideways slant and quite literally punch-drunk expression.

For a minute, Drakken couldn't remember how to speak. The shame threatened to smother him. "Senior," he finally got out in a raspy whisper.

Shego squinted one eye at him. "Say what?"

"Senior!" Drakken repeated, much louder this time. It came out with an edge panic, a sensation more familiar but no pleasanter than the shame. The blaze in his chest made the pain in his head seem like a finger prick.

For a blink, Shego looked startled, but her voice was even as she said, "What _about_ Senior?"

"The Seniors were getting there right when he left - " he began.

Naturally, she had to interrupt. "Yeah, I just said that."

"- and Senior asked if everything was okay, and you told him something!" Drakken shrieked over her. He could hear his own voice going raw, careening out of control, but he didn't care. He could imagine Senior's face twisted with revulsion, his wonderful, wise, wrinkled lip lifting the way everyone else's did, and it wasn't a picture he could live with. "What did you tell him?"

"Okay, okay, okay." Shego raised both palms like she was trying to hold off a rabid dog. "Calm down."

Was she kidding?

Shego dug her fingers into her hair, and they disappeared up to the knuckles. "Look, look. Just give me a minute."

Drakken stayed stock-still, except for the nervous wiping of his sweaty palms on his thighs, trying not to _look_ like he was about to burst wide open. But he could feel his eyes practically popping out of their sockets, and they bulged farther the longer Shego raked her hair and didn't answer.

After what felt like ten thousand years, his sidekick finally untangled her fingers from her hair and stared at him solemnly - like, why couldn't she do that while he was explaining his schemes? "I don't remember _exactly_ what I said," she said so slowly that Drakken seriously considered shaking her, "but I think it was something like 'Dr. Drakken had a bit too much to drink. I'm taking him home so he can sleep it off.'"

The chest-flames stopped in mid-sizzle. Those words weren't mocking or flippant to meant to mortify him, though they still did, just a smidge. In fact, he couldn't think of any nicer way to put it without lying - which Senior probably would've seen through - or telling him that he'd thought it was fruit punch - which she hadn't known. "You - you said that?" Drakken asked cautiously, just in case he'd heard completely wrong and his life really was wrecked after all.

"That's what I said," Shego confirmed. "'Cause, I mean, you don't say 'plastered' to Senior. You just _don't_."

Forget shaking her. Now the urge to hug her was overpowering, but Drakken resisted. He'd tried that a few times, and it always resulted in green plasma scorching holes in his sleeves. Instead, he closed his eyes to savor Shego's moment of respect, even if it had been more for Senior's sake than his.

"Yes," he murmured gruffly. "That is satisfactory."

Shego snickered under her breath, the way she tended to do when he used big words, and the moment passed. Still, when Drakken considered how she'd gotten him home safe and brought him Gatorade and everything, he concluded that he could let it go. Just this once.

No sooner had he made that decision than a little whimper slipped, entirely unpermitted, through his lips. All of a sudden, all Drakken could think about was the ocean surrounding his island lair - hence, why it was an _island_ lair - and not the calm sea that taunted him when he was a bundle of twisted nerves. No, what he saw was the dark, moody water, the perfect backdrop for his maniacal monologues, on a thunderstorm-night, when the waves tossed each other around in the wind and crashed themselves angrily on the beach, their filmy foam flying straight up in the air. His stomach was beginning to feel like that.

Drakken's eyes opened to see Shego studying him quizzically, which also never ended well. "Why do you care?" she asked.

Her eyes were their all-seeing selves and he knew his were being _their_ all-telling selves, so he shifted them away from her. One look at them and she'd come back with the answer, an answer even Drakken wasn't one-hundred-percent sure of. He didn't need Shego telling him any more things he hadn't figured out about himself, not today.

Drakken stuck his nose up in the air haughtily. "I don't," he said, careful to keep his voice in dead, couldn't-care-less zone.

"Yeah, obviously you do." Shego reached over and poked his shoulder, nearly jolting him out of his skin. "So what's the deal?"

At least she hadn't said "sitch." Drakken didn't answer, just pressed his lips tighter so they wouldn't vibrate. Another burp - a very large one - was creeping up his throat. He swallowed it and immediately felt like he'd eaten a hand grenade.

Shego's face got that I-figured-it-out shine. Needles stabbed at the back of his neck.

"Oh, _I_ get it," she said, drawing out the "I." Clearly she found this delicious. "You don't want Senior thinking you're some kind of lush, do you?"

_Lush_. Another word he hadn't heard before today and never wanted to hear again. And she'd gotten disturbingly close to the reason for his discomfort - okay, so she was right on the nose, but he'd never admit that to her. It felt like a special secret, tucked somewhere in the deepest part of him, and Drakken hadn't had too many of those. He wanted to keep this one.

"We're not talking about it," Drakken hissed. "I _mean_ it," he added forcefully before she could even come up with a retort. "Change the subject!"

Mischief sparked in Shego's eyes. "If I do, do I get a raise?"

Ugh. Leave it to her to find a way to make money off a catastrophe like this. She knew full well he wasn't made of money - in fact, he was barely scraping by, hardly able to afford to pay her her current salary.

He hadn't told Shego _that_ part, and it _wasn't_ a fun secret to keep. Instead of staying hidden away somewhere safe inside him, it oozed out of whatever compartment he tried to lock it in, rubbing at the itch in his chest. He shot a scowl at his sidekick, all ready with his lecture on how evil family should come first, but what came out was, "Ghenngh nik!"

"Okay, how about for getting you home and making sure you didn't get yourself killed last night?" There was nothing playful about Shego anymore. Her arms were folded smartly across her chest, her chin coming to a point you could have cut yourself on.

Still, Drakken noticed for the first time that she looked almost as worn-out as he must have. Her hair was sticking out in funny places, olive-green circles cupped her eyes, and even the smirk she gave him seemed tired. Some small part of him felt bad for her. Whatever she'd done last night had probably been above and beyond the call of duty, and unlike James - at least, the James who was his college chum - he knew Shego wasn't above extortion.

He was sick of being broke, sick of the red that had overtaken his checkbook, even sick of the villainous greed that rose up in him when he HenchCo's state-of-the-art black helicopters or one of those automatic trashcans on the home shopping network. But Shego was even more fond of the green stuff than he was. If she wanted a raise - or, worse, _deserved_ a raise - and didn't get one -

"All right," Drakken said reluctantly. He wasn't sure how he was going to come up with the extra money, but if he didn't Shego might leave, and that was the worst scenario he could imagine. "On two conditions."

Shego blinked as if she'd just remembered he was in charge. "Which are?" Her brows morphed from checkmarks to question marks.

Drakken adopted his firmest expression and thrust out his own chin - that big, round one that wouldn't point like hers if he went after it with her nail file. "One: my mother never hears about this."

The twinkle was back in Shego's eye, though she at least had the decency not to grin. Drakken didn't see anything amusing about the entire situation. If Mother found out her "little baby Drewbie" had gotten drunk - even on accident - her reaction would make Shego's seem like, "Ehh, no big deal."

"Done," Shego said quickly. She flashed two fingers at him. "And number two?"

Drakken pulled in a deep breath, held it until his lung begged for mercy, let it out in a big whoosh. His eyes were watering, and that made it seem like he was observing his surroundings from behind a layer of glass that hadn't been cleaned in six months. "Tell me everything's going to be all right," he commanded the green-and-black smear he guessed was his sidekick. Hornets hummed in his ears.

Shego's eyes either hardened or softened; he couldn't tell which through the smudgy glass. "Ooo-kaaay." She stretched the word out tight, the way Kim Possible did when she thought his plans were nonsensical because she wasn't smart enough to understand them. Why, Drakken wondered, was he unlucky enough to repeatedly encounter people who could turn even the word "okay" into an insult?

But most of the snark disappeared from Shego's voice when she said, "Everything's gonna be all right, Doc." She even leaned over and patted his knee, which was somehow degrading and reassuring at the same time.

There was a tiny glimmer of security before the world disappeared in a blur of heat that seemed to rise directly from the center of his sternum. The wasps droned so loud, Drakken barely heard himself say, "Good. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to vomit my guts out."

And he proceeded to hang over the side of the bed - that must have been why they called it a _hangover_, he realized dazedly - and do just that.

()()()()()()

"Well, since you're obviously not in dire peril anymore," Shego said ten torturous minutes later, "I don't see a whole lot of point in sticking around."

Drakken knew she was right - would it have killed her to be wrong, just once? Of course, he didn't want her to be wrong about _this_, since that would mean he really _was_ dying and that thought gave him no satisfaction.

Besides, he knew if he were going to die from this, it would've been last night. In a way, the worst was over. Headaches, upset stomachs - he'd had those before. The room wasn't spinning, the ground didn't tilt beneath him, and there was a connection between his brain and his body again, and all of those put him in a much better place than he was twelve hours ago.

Which brought him back to Shego's being right. He wasn't in any danger, unless you counted the danger of going insane from the sheer vise-like grip pain hand on your head, and she didn't need to be there anymore. She'd groused about having to get the henchmen to clean out the bucket, like Drakken had _wanted_ to bring up what had made him miserable enough going down, and made several less-than-friendly remarks about how pathetic he was in his current condition, and Drakken was becoming less and less grateful for her presence. Scientifically speaking, there was no reason for her to stay.

Except for the fact that he always felt so much safer when Shego was around. There was some logic behind that, too - prior experience and the patterns formed in the past - but he knew Shego wouldn't buy that. It was also an embarrassing, unvillainous thing to admit, and Drakken wasn't desperate enough to risk what remained of his evil reputation.

"So - I'm gonna go home and take a nap," Shego went on. Her voice sounded loud to his tired ears, sending his already-nervous thoughts skittering to unreachable corners of his brain. She paused to yawn - something he'd rarely seen her do - and it made Drakken have to yawn, too. One of the world's great mysteries.

He considered protesting that decision, just because someone was punching him in the forehead, over and over, and he needed to fight with _some_body. But he found he couldn't, not with what was left in his stomach boiling and Shego standing there looking so human.

"Very well," Drakken conceded, making sure to sound pleasant like the stern-but-benevolent boss he was. He waved his dismissively, shooing away the image she surely had of this helpless creature who couldn't function without her. "Go home and wink forty times or whatever the saying is. . ."

Shego snickered even though he hadn't done anything silly and strode toward the door, each step she took away from him making Drakken a little lonelier. He wanted to her to leave him alone - but he didn't want her to _leave_ him _alone_. He groaned; and people wondered why he preferred differential calculus to his emotions.

Halfway across the room, his associate stopped and threw a glance back at him, the steel in her glare softened by sleepiness. "You should probably try to get some rest, too." Her face kind of mushed for a second, like she was seeing a frightened toddler instead of a notorious villain. Drakken's neck hairs stirred on principle, but he was too exhausted to argue - and for him, that was really saying something. "I mean, the only cure for a hangover is - "

"Sleep?" he interrupted hopefully. If that was the case, it should work out just fine, considering all he wanted to do was melt into the bedspread and take a seven-hour nap.

Shego shook her head, and Drakken remembered to look away from the swaying hair. "Time," she said. "And sleep's probably the least painful way to spend that time."

That made sense, good sense. Drakken closed his eyes to let his mind focus on processing that information and storing it for future reference.

Future reference? Drakken stiffened into suspended animation, his brain stilled in mid-scan. Future _reference_?

What, was he planning to do this again? Preparing for the inevitable repeat performance that he would be powerless to resist?

Drakken's eyes sprang back open wide. "Shego!" he blurted just as her hand touched the doorknob, just before his throat closed up.

Shego didn't turn to face him, but he could see the sigh in her shoulders. "What is it, Dr. D?" she asked tightly. If he'd thought he'd heard a trace of tenderness before, it was long gone now.

It took Drakken a minute to regain any capacity for speech. "Am I some kind of alcoholic now?" he inquired, teeth clacking together in that uncontrollable way he hated.

Shego's response wasn't exactly what he'd expected. She threw back her head and howled. Drakken tried to laugh, too, but the best he could manage was a dry cough. Surely if she was laughing, it couldn't be that bad. . . right?

"Heh-heh-heh," he was finally able to titter. "Um, why are we laughing?"

Shego's chuckles stopped as if she'd understood the gravity of the situation, but the amusement playing around her mouth told him she hadn't. "Because you - " she stabbed a finger at Drakken - "just got drunk for the first time in your entire life - completely by accident, might I add - and now you're worried you're an alcoholic."

Well, gee when she put it that way, it sounded kind of stupid. "So I take it that's a 'no'?" Drakken ventured, pretending to be fascinated by his hands. Without the gloves they seemed to have shrunk since yesterday, covered with picked-at hangnails and a few hives left over from his latest chemical experiment gone horribly wrong.

"Yeah, it's a 'no,'" she said dryly. Her brows hiked. "That is, unless you have the powerful urge to go out and do it again."

_Again_? His jaw nearly came unhinged. The thought was incomprehensible.

Drakken managed to shake what felt like a head full of cement. Things were starting to go fuzzy around the edges and float before his eyes. It was from sheer fatigue, he knew, but it was so much like being drunk his stomach lurched again, and this time he was sure the hangover had nothing to do with it.

"That's what I thought." Shego sounded like she was about to burst back into laughter at any moment.

Drakken, on the other hand, didn't know if he'd ever laugh again. Even with the assurance that he wasn't a worthless drunk and Shego being almost friendly and the knowledge that his mother would never find out - even with all that, he still felt kind of grimy. It could have been the taste in his mouth, he guessed.

Whatever the reason, he said, "No," as solemnly as he could. "I'm never going near anything with alcohol again!"

Shego's face took on that teasing shine. "Not even mouthwash?"

Drakken froze. "Wha?"

"Mouthwash," his sidekick replied matter-of-factly. "Most kinda have alcohol." The shine got brighter. "And, by the way, you could _really_ use some right now."

Now that was just uncalled for. He scowled so hard he felt it draw sharp creases along the sides of his mouth. Shego gave a smooth-faced frown in reply. Youth truly was wasted on the young.

The mouthwash revelation was much more important, however. In horror, Drakken thought of the tall bottle lurking on the shelf above the bathroom sink - smelling so innocent and minty, when all along it had been harboring an ingredient of pure evil! All it would take were a couple of swishes with some accidental swallowing, and he would be stumbling into walls again.

Shego must have noticed his stricken look, because she came and parked herself on the edge of his bed like they were having a friendly conversation. "See, the thing with alcoholics is that part of their bodies come to _need_ that alcohol," she explained. "And that part needs it so bad they're willing to destroy the rest of their bodies to get it."

She rolled her eyes heavenward. "Geez, I sound like a pamphlet. Does that make sense to you, though?"

Drakken nodded with great effort, even though he wasn't sure how much of that he'd actually understood. Each word had dropped like it weighed five tons, so he knew they had to be important. He'd have to pull them back out and examine them later, but for now it was all he could do to keep his eyes open and his attention on Shego.

His sidekick leaned in closer, her spread-apart hands framing the air like bookends. "Look, what happened last night was an honest mistake. A really stupid one," she added with a scoff, "but just a mistake. Don't go getting a complex over it or anything."

Drakken exhaled shakily. As snappy and no-nonsense as those words had been, there was a strange comfort to them. Maybe it was because they were calm and sensible and straightened everything crooked about last night. Or maybe it was just because they came out of Shego's mouth.

"Though, if you do this again -" here her voice regained its sharpness - "I _will_ have your head."

He tucked the covers up to his chin, feeling everything that stuck up above them throb. "You can have it now," Drakken mumbled.

Shego's lips twitched infinitesimally, and she got up and started back toward the door. Obviously, she was done talking, but the conversation seemed incomplete to him, like a chemical formula lacking a key ingredient, or a jigsaw puzzle with a piece missing right in the middle. There had to be something he could say that would erase the memory of the night before and take the shame with it.

And then the piece locked into place, bright lights flashed, the equation balanced, and the bell all the way at the top of the pole dinged in triumph. "Shego!" he burst out, sitting bolt upright so dizzily fast he threatened to topple off the bed. "Wait!"

Shego spun around, looking entirely unamused. Usually that was a little. . . unsettling, but Drakken refused to drop his gaze this time. Instead, he looked her right in the eye, tapped his fingertips together, and sputtered what he should have said twenty-two years ago. "Thank you for saving my life."

Shego didn't fling her arms around her neck or tell him all was forgiven. She did something better. She smiled, and he wished he had a camera. She looked so nice when she smiled. Young and almost cute, like the little sister he never had. She should do it more often.

Drakken did look at his lap then, because he could feel his eyes softening. Shego didn't need to see that, not after she'd already witnessed him getting drunk and barfing and otherwise making a general fool of himself.

"See ya," Shego said lightly before he heard the door squeak. That was pretty good for her. Usually she didn't even bother with a goodbye before she left, sometimes while he was in mid-sentence, which really burned him up - and, you know what, he wasn't going to think about that right now. Anger used up too much energy.

Drakken twiddled his fingers in a little wave because he'd run out of things to say. Even the chopped-up syllables that could always be counted on to pop out of his mouth when he was frustrated had abandoned him.

All the parts of his brain that weren't absolutely necessary for survival were shutting down, preparing for sleep that wouldn't come. As sick and tuckered out as he was, he should have drifted right off, but Drakken's eyes kept flying open as if their lids couldn't bear to touch, and there was a weird twitch to his left leg that jolted his entire body out of relaxation every thirty seconds.

Drakken could only lie there, listening to Shego's fading footsteps and his own ragged breathing and the soothing hum of the air conditioner. None of them were loud enough to drown out the voices in his head.

Not audible, disembodied, crazy-person voices - that wasn't his particular area of madness - but recordings from his past. Apparently well-preserved ones, because he could hear the voices mocking him as plainly as if it had happened to day - Carl Thompson's, Jack Hench's, James Possible's, Professor Dementor's. There were times when it was easy to be recklessly evil and not care what people thought of him. Right now wasn't one of those times.

_Leave me alone!_ he ordered them. _Get away from me, or suffer the wrath of Dr. Drakken!_

The voices didn't budge. They weren't afraid of him. Neither were the faces that popped up to join them - Duff Killigan's amused, Junior's twisted into a question mark, Dementor's condescending, Shego's annoyed.

Worst of all was Senior's. Drakken hadn't gotten a good look at him last night, so his imagination had to take over, and he watched that kind old face flip through every possibility from concern to disgust. The one that made Drakken want to throw up, though, was the blank expression, a mask of required politeness that hid Senior's thoughts. Thoughts like, _That is the most repugnant thing I've seen all week_, or _Now THERE'S someone without an ounce of self-control_.

Drakken would have punched his pillow if he'd had the strength. He wouldn't, shouldn't, _couldn't_ care about Senior's view of him. After all, what was he but an old man with a cane and a passing interest in villainy? And no matter what he thought of Drakken, it wouldn't change the fact that _Drakken_ was the one destined to rule the world, so his opinion didn't matter.

It_ didn't_.

_Condescending_! That was the word he'd been looking for twenty minutes ago, the one that described Dementor to a T, whatever a "T" was. _I hate him because he's so _condescending_!_ he mentally crowed in triumph and wished Shego were here to hear it. Why did the right words only come to him when nobody was around to show them off to?

Ah, well. He'd make sure to impress her with it tomorrow.

Hugging the perfect-word feeling to his chest, Drakken rolled over as his belly gurgled its protest. He wrapped his arms into a protective fold over it and snuggled into the pillow, repeating "condescending" to himself so he wouldn't lose it and remembering Shego smiling at him. His eyelids drooped down into darkness - comforting darkness, not the thick, dangerous kind that had threatened to swallow him this morning when he thought he was dead. After a few minutes, he drifted off into a wonderful, dreamless sleep.

**()()()()()**

**The book that Drakken references is, of course, "Anne of Green Gables."  
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**NOTE 11/13 - Edited to fix some typos and junk.  
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	7. Chapter 7

**And we are. . . done! Thanks to everyone who stuck with me this whole time; it means a lot to me. :) I'd love to hear from you, so feel free to leave a review - if you want.  
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_To do today (or sometime in the neer future):_

Several hours later, Dr. Drakken leaned his head against the back of his Thinking Chair and sighed with contentment - the contentment that, earlier this morning, he'd been sure he'd never feel again. Tapping his pen against his chin in thought, he closed his mad-scientist logbook and drummed his fingers on its green-and-white-speckled cover with its picture of Frankenstein's monster, the one the ignorant masses referred to simply as "Frankenstein."

For the first time, Drakken envied the nameless creature who made him look like George Clooney. At least if _he_ ever got a hangover, he could just unscrew his head and leave it in the closet until it stopped pounding.

In all fairness, though, he felt a lot better now. His stomach didn't want anything in it, but the dry heaves had stopped. His head still hurt, but it didn't feel like people were using power tools on it anymore. And the very fact that he'd remembered to tap his chin with the end of the pen that wouldn't leave ink on it showed that the fog in his brain was lifting. He simply felt limp and drained, as if a vampire had sunken its fangs into his tranverse cervical veins and sucked him dry.

Drakken had slept for three-and-a-half blissful hours before waking up stiff and sore and groggy. But the room stayed stationary, and when he'd dared to swing his legs out of bed and place his feet on the floor, the ground didn't wobble and send him to his knees. He'd never realized how much he'd taken those things for granted before.

Now Drakken turned his attention back to his logbook, crossing out the first - and so far, only - item on the list. Running a line through it proved immensely satisfying.

_*Throw away all mouthwash, hand satinizer, and rubbing alcohaul!_

That was the second thing he'd done once he was able to get out of bed. (The first was to brush his teeth six times.) The smell of them when they were gathered in his arms - that alone made him shudder, and he'd held his breath so they wouldn't plaster him again.

Although he still felt gross, with his clothes soaked with last night's sweat and his mouth tasting like fermented fruit and stomach acid, Drakken knew he was in much better shape than he had been a few hours ago. All right, so he'd gotten queasy when he'd bent over to drop the sinister items in the trash and had to sprint to the sink and spit up Gatorade, but he'd done it without the wrenching stomach convulsions and the relief had been immediate.

At any rate, he felt way better than he looked - at least if the bathroom mirror could be trusted, and he was pretty sure it could. It was always weird to see the scar on the wrong cheek - well, on the right cheek, which was the wrong cheek - but that jagged line of damaged tissue was the last thing on Drakken's mind when he saw who was looking back at him. He wouldn't be mistaken for a movie star on his best days, and this was definitely not one of his best days.

His face was puffy, pinkish in the cheek that had pillow lines carved down then but a washed-out blue everywhere else. Crusty, dried stuff was flaked at the corners of his eyes and mouth and under his nose. His lab coat was rumpled, bagging on him as if he'd lost weight overnight, and those tiny hands trembled, ignoring his order to curl themselves into fists. His eyes, dull and swollen and saggy, were so red they looked like laser beams, which was actually kind of cool, with big circles the color of ink smeared under them. Even his hair looked lifeless, stringing to his shoulders in matted hunks, too damp with sweat to even flip up at the ends the way it usually did.

Drakken had closed his eyes, but the image of his gross self had stayed with him. No matter what Shego said, he certainly _looked_ the part of a drunk who'd passed out in the gutter. _But I'm not,_ Drakken reminded himself over and over, backing up until he hit the wall. _I'm not._

He let himself drop the floor, spine pressed against the wall, and studied the bathroom tiles just because he was so happy they didn't whirl in circles anymore. _"Part of their bodies come to_ need _that alcohol,"_ Shego's voice added in his memory. _"And that part needs it so bad they're willing to destroy the rest of their bodies to get it."_

That clearly didn't describe him, Drakken thought. He need alcohol like he needed Kim Possible - and his entire body was in agreement. If he ever did anything like that again, he was sure all of _his_ parts would mutiny.

Still, the idea of a part so tiny, yet so powerful, fascinated Drakken. He wondered if he had one like that.

Why did that part crave alcohol so badly, though? Now if it were, say, cookies, then Drakken would understand. But this stuff didn't taste too great, didn't fill you up, and he was sure puking in trash cans was nobody's idea of a good time.

He closed his eyes again and tipped his head back, happy to let his scientific mind take over, to see alcohol as nothing more than a chemical. It had been used as a sort of primitive anesthesia, he knew. Got the patient drunk so he wouldn't feel a thing. It numbed you, he'd heard, but unless you were having a leg amputated, Drakken didn't really see the appeal of _that_, either.

He had felt numb before - usually with shock, after something terrible had just happened - and he'd hated it. It was like all his nerves had shut down, leaving him to watch the world through a sheet of Plexiglass. At least it kept the pain out - but it didn't feel right, as if he'd heard his leg snap and felt only cold nothingness. If it was broken and it didn't hurt, something was wrong, no matter what "it" was. He'd prefer emotion, almost _any_ emotion - except that blasted frustration.

Drakken had considered that as he'd gotten to his feet, knees popping in a way he hadn't remembered them doing last month. He thought of Shego, with her smooth face and cold eyes. She wasn't numb to _everything_; he'd seen her temper in action enough to know that. But sadness, fear, wordless pain - those were foreign concepts to her.

Most importantly, her conscience never seemed to bother her. Drakken swallowed hard. Maybe he would make a better supervillain - be able to conquer the world - if he _was_ numb. Now _there_ was something that might be worth destroying his body for. Drakken got that same shiver of dread and bittersweet taste in his mouth as he had that awful night back in college. It was as if he was standing on the edge of everything he knew, discovering evil for the first time.

Drakken stuck his tongue, cracked and dry as a piece of sandpaper, out at his reflection and turned away so he couldn't watch his own face crumple. Yeah, he had a part like that.

Now he scowled down at the nearly-blank page in front of him and wished he'd written all that down, just so he could have the pleasure of scribbling through it in dark, angry lines. But that would have required him to find words for the jumble of pangs and pokes inside, and there weren't any. He knew - he'd wasted plenty of time looking for them.

Drakken also knew that he was lucky just to be able to jot down his to-do list. Snuggling down farther into the folds of the blue bathrobe so old most of the fuzziness had worn off the outside, he refocused on doing just that.

_*Dock the henchmen's paychecks by 5% so I can raise Shego's. Maybe 10%, to afford that cable premium package. (They have a sci-fi channle!)_

_*Invent a hangover-inducing ray and hit Kim Possible with it. She'll be incapeable of getting out of bed, much less foiling my plots!_

Drakken paused over that one and frowned. Some things were too cruel even for him.

_*Steal that Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer that Dementor was so obsessed with getting last year. That'll teach him to get me drunk!_

Drakken forced half a smile, because he knew the idea of getting revenge on Dementor should have made him happy. And it would have, except that he was too busy feeling like an old jack-o-lantern, hollow and mushy and ready to collapse into himself.

_*And, oh yeah. Take over the world!_

He chewed on the pen cap as the thoughts that had fallen into place so neatly on paper tumbled around in his head. There was one other thing that belonged on the list, but Drakken wasn't sure he should write it down, because he'd been arguing with himself all afternoon about whether or not to even do it.

He had plenty of reasons _not_ to do it. It was stupid. It was pointless. It was unprofessional. It wouldn't do a thing to bring him closer to world domination.

Then why did the hollow place inside him fill up every time he thought about it?

Drakken grunted and glanced out one of his new non-blacked-out windows. It was strange to see the sun so low in the sky when he still had waking-up grog in his throat. The human sleep cycle was based on darkness and light, and falling asleep in the morning and getting up in the afternoon made Drakken feel like he'd broken a rule somehow.

The thought that he'd done something he wasn't supposed to gave him delightful tingles up and down his arms, but it didn't get rid of the empty spot. Neither did anything else on his to-do list. Nothing except the idea that he'd been turning over in his brain for the past hour.

It wasn't even a particularly calming idea. There was no assurance that everything was going to be just fine, no offer of relief from the sweaty palms and nauseous taste in his mouth. Just a full, solid, itchless chest and a disturbing feeling of goodness.

What was even scarier was that part of Drakken wanted to cling to it. Surely, as wicked as he was, it wouldn't damage his evil level to do something good every now and then, would it? Just because he was a ruthless conqueror didn't mean he had to be a bad person.

Pulling his pen out of his mouth, Drakken scribbled down, _Call Senior and explian!_ Then he jumped to his feet, knocking logbook and pen to the floor, and bolted for his office to retrieve the phone and Jack Hench's Villain Directory before he could lose his nerve.

Once he was back in his Thinking Chair, reminding himself to breathe, Drakken began to rehearse a speech. As slippery and confusing as words were, he had to admit they were fascinating little creatures. Some slid out like honey; some popped in his mouth. His favorites swelled and boomed when they hit the air. His least favorites clogged his throat and oozed between his teeth in tangled chunks.

And _these_ words had to be perfect. He handpicked each one with great care, examining it from all angles to make sure it said what he wanted it to say. He chose words that were just the right mixture of complexity and simpleness, cold, flat ones that kept his emotions in check, and, most importantly, words that would remind Senior - and himself - that Dr. Drakken was soon to rule the world. Ones that built a castle and let him stay huddled safely inside.

When all the words were lined up just right in his mind, Drakken flipped through the Villain Directory to the "S"s, stopping only briefly in the "D"s to admire his name in print. There were the Seniors' names and their phone number, looking surprisingly. . . ordinary. They weren't glittery-bright or even in bold type the way Drakken had expected them to be.

What was _with_ him today? If anybody's name deserved to be written in letters six inches tall, it was his own, not those of some filthy-rich father-son duo - something heavy lodged halfway up Drakken's esophagus and he had to massage his neck until it broke apart and the pieces drifted away.

Once it was gone, Drakken snatched up the phone and gazed at its gray squareness, strangely comforted by the fact that it looked exactly like it had last time he'd used it. His finger trembled over a button for a moment before he gathered every speck of desperate courage he had and slammed down on it so hard, he was surprised it didn't pop out the back. With a short, loud "BEEP!", the phone acknowledged the "1" you had to dial before any long-distance call - and this was _mega_-long-distance.

It also accepted the next ten numbers that Drakken pecked out, hesitantly, between glances at the directory to make sure each digit was placed in proper formation in his mind. Sometimes when he got upset enough, or even excited enough, _those_ got shuffled around, too. Drakken wasn't sure why - numbers were generally much friendlier than letters.

As soon as he hit the last button with a pinky that fit perfectly on the little square, there was an infuriating pause, and then the phone began to ring. And ring. And ring. Drakken had never noticed before what a nerve-jangling sound that was, especially six times in a row.

He waited, breath held, for the click that would tell him someone had picked up on the other end, but it wasn't coming, and Drakken could feel his face turning bluer. Maybe the Seniors weren't home. Maybe they had Caller ID and didn't want to talk to the drunken slimeball they'd watched stagger out of HenchCo the night before. Maybe he'd scrambled the numbers after all, and he was really calling Hong Kong.

A click sounded in his ear then, so faintly Drakken would have thought he'd imagined it if he hadn't heard the breathing. Breathing too calm and even to be his own. He cleared his throat to get rid of the frightened tickle that still lurked there and opened his mouth, ready with his explanation -

"The Seniors' private island. How may I help you?" The shrill voice sliced through his scalp like a knife.

Definitely. Not. Senior.

Drakken gritted his teeth at the now-familiar stabs of pain that shot through his head. "Hello, Junior," he hissed to the kid whose existence he'd forgotten until this very moment. "This is Dr. Drakken."

He wasn't able to make it come out with a boom, and there was a very long silence before Junior said, "Oh." Drakken could hear a waver of uncertainty - maybe even fear?

It should have thrilled him. After all, he'd been waiting over twenty years to finally scare someone - besides the buffoon, who also freaked out at the sight of monkeys and lawn gnomes. But this wasn't the type of fear he longed for, the kind that came from awe at his evil and his genius. No, this came from last night, the same sort of disgusted fear Drakken knew he would've had in his own eyes if he saw someone so drunk and out of control that he'd have no idea what the guy was going to do next.

It was a type of fear Drakken never knew existed, a type that didn't come with respect, and so he didn't want it. And so, of course, that was the only kind he was ever going to get.

Drakken dragged those thoughts across his mental desktop and dropped them in the Recycle Bin. Fear was fear, and it gave him power - sweet, tingling power that he almost didn't know what to do with - and that was all that mattered. Scared people would do anything you told them to.

Right. Drakken put on his most menacing face, even though he knew it wouldn't do him much good over the phone, and worked up a growl sure to intimidate the little pop star wannabe. "May I speak to your. . . father?" In spite of the gravel he was happy to have creepy back into his voice, the word broke in his throat - it wasn't one he was used to saying.

There was an even longer silence, and Drakken had to chomp down on his tongue to keep from hollering, "That wasn't a hard question!" Having a meltdown definitely wouldn't win Junior's respect, but he could feel one creeping up on him -

"Yes, of course," Junior finally said carefully, like he was speaking in a language he didn't really know. "Just a moment, please."

Drakken winced, hands poised to cover his ears, waiting for Junior to scream, "Poppy, phone for you!" But instead, he heard the phone being set down, footsteps hurrying away. Huh. So the kid had some manners after all.

He grunted to himself. Of _course_ he had manners. He was _Senior_'s son, so he'd obviously been brought up right. For a startled moment, Drakken even understood Junior's lack of interest in villainy. Growing up with a dad like that - why would you need to be evil?

The thought was strange and unsettling, and no matter how hard Drakken tried to give it a bitter edge, it made him feel sad and droopy. It was a vulnerable place he couldn't let himself go.

So he pressed the phone tighter to his ear and focused all of his attention on figuring out what was going on at the Seniors' "crib," as the teens today called it. Junior shrieked something in the background, followed by a low voice that, for some reason, made him think of leaves in a stream - kinda surprising, since his mind generally didn't conjure up images that pleasant. Apparently, not even his son's fingernails-on-a-chalkboard voice ruffled Senior's composure.

Drakken wished he could say the same. The minute he'd heard that squeak on the other end of the line, his perfectly prepared speech had vanished into thin air. Now Senior was coming to the phone and he'd have to face him with no words, no plan, no reason for why he'd called. The empty feeling in his gut was back. He had the sudden, intense craving for a donut, even though his stomach was still sort of upset.

For a second, he considered hanging up, but to do that would be to admit defeat, and that was something Dr. Drakken never did. Well, hardly ever. Besides, he was going to get charged for the call anyway, so he might as well try to see it through. He thought guiltily of his phone bill and made a silent vow to cut his henchmen's wages by another five percent.

Drakken could make out the thump of footsteps and the low murmur of Senior's voice on the other end of the line; their increasing volume told him they were getting closer. Then he heard Junior say, as clearly as if he were right next to the phone, "It is Dr. Drakken."

Just the sound of his name whining out of the kid's mouth made hummingbirds flutter in Drakken's stomach. Sure, Junior's voice was like a cat with its tail being pulled, but he had the same accent as his father - that crisp one that made each syllable pop like a carefully controlled firecracker.

There was something almost majestic about it, something that not even Drakken's self-imposed, quasi-British, villain-accent could copy. Made him feel like a little peasant boy appearing before the king, and that was something a conquering tyrant should never have to experience. He was that close to hurling all over the arm of the Thinking Chair when the phone was picked up with a clunk and someone said, "Hello?"

Softly. Kindly. Barely above a whisper.

And at that moment, though he couldn't have explained it to anyone, Drakken knew why he'd had to call.

It put him so at ease, in fact, that he didn't even wait for the boom to return to his voice before he began. "Yes," he scraped out with as much dignity as he could muster in his bathrobe and bunny slippers, blinking hard against the sudden sting in his eyes. "This is Dr. Drakken."

Drakken sucked in his breath again and, for a moment, forgot how to exhale as he anticipated Senior's reaction. It occurred to him that he'd never heard the old man get mad before. He wondered what he would sound like mad.

He never found out. If anything, Senior's tone grew even warmer. "Ah, Dr. Drakken!" he said in a way that made Drakken picture a square hand heartily clasping his own much smaller one, arm swept out to welcome him. "How are you feeling?"

The hummingbirds stilled out of sheer bewilderment. How had Senior known he would be sick?

More importantly, why did Senior care?

The automatic _Because you're meant to rule the world, and he knows you're much more important than him_, as well as the hiss of _Get a grip. Senior's just being polite. Don't get your hopes up_, seemed pathetic, and they were growing fainter by the second. Drakken shoved them both aside and answered. "Better now. I was sick earlier."

Something told him he probably shouldn't have admitted that - supervillains didn't _get_ sick, and when they did, they kept it to themselves. Still, there was something about Senior, even over the phone, that made Drakken think he could tell him just about anything. Maybe even about the bathrobe and bunny slippers.

Senior gave a soft, rich chuckle that didn't sound for a minute like he was laughing at Drakken. "Yes, I would imagine so."

See, now, if Shego or Kim Possible had said that, it would've come across as mean and nasty. Not Senior, though. His voice was full of pity. No - sympathy. There was nothing demeaning about it.

Drakken released his first real smile since waking up, but it didn't stick around very long. With the explanation he'd rehearsed in shreds, the only thing left for him to do was blurt out the facts. That should've been easy - he'd done it dozens of times, and in situations far more dire than this - but now, the prospect was turning his palms clammy again.

He had to do it just right; one wrong word could warp Senior's understanding of the truth. Drakken coughed to try and get rid of the inexplicable lump threatening to choke him. No pressure or anything.

"Look, about last night," Drakken stammered quickly, before Senior could recall last night and come to the wrong conclusions. "I didn't mean -" He stopped, backpedaled. "It was an acci -" No, that wasn't right, either. "I mean - I thought it was fruit punch."

Saying _those_ words was like throwing up. They burned in his throat and splattered messily out of his mouth, but getting them out gave him an overwhelming sense of relief. They weren't perfect, but they were the best he had, and that was going to have to be enough -

Unless it wasn't.

Drakken sprang out of his relieved sag into the Thinking Chair, sweat already beading on his nose. _"Has it ever occurred to you that maybe your best just isn't good enough?"_ Shego's taunt from back right before the Attitudinator mishap echoed through his head.

And Shego was always right.

There was a thick silence that wasn't awkward, because nothing Senior did was awkward, but it seemed to fill the whole room. Drakken ate his fingernails off in a straight line, half expecting to ding like a typewriter when he got to the end of the row.

"That is most unfortunate," Senior finally said. "I am only glad it was not worse." A brief pause. "Thank you for telling me."

Drakken spit out his mouthful of nails and pressed the phone tighter to his ears as if that would bring Senior closer. He'd drowned out Shego's voice, and that wasn't easy to do.

It made Drakken brave enough to explore new territory, stopping just short of confessing an emotion. "I just wanted you to know I'm not some kind of. . . drunk." "Lush," Shego had said, but that word was too ugly to leave his lips.

Senior gave a quiet "Ah" that told Drakken he understood everything he'd said - and everything he _hadn't_ said. "No, of course not," he added, his politeness so reassuring it nearly made Drakken cry. "One of the reasons I was so concerned was that you did not strike me as the type to overindulge like that."

The purest sense of joy that he'd felt since he was about seven years old floated through Drakken as those words sank in. He wanted to leap through the phone and curl up at the feet of this person who'd believed in him. "Really?" he squeaked instead.

"Indeed." He could hear Senior shift smoothly in his seat. "That was obviously not typical behavior for you. I figured you had misjudged the strength of the beverage." His wise old voice wasn't just respectful anymore. It sounded soft, in a way Drakken had only heard it when he was talking to Junior.

It made the Thinking Chair grow squishier under him, the pounding in his head fade to a dull ache, the sky outside seem bluer. Drakken's throat clogged again, but it was a happy lump this time. "Really?" he repeated.

He could almost _see_ Senior wink. "It happens to the best of us, my friend."

With those words, he gave Drakken his dignity back. Not by wrapping it up and putting a bow on it and making a big show of returning it - just by walking up and casually handing it to him and acting like he'd never lost it in the first place. Drakken couldn't control the tremor in his lips.

He wanted to jump up and down and shriek with glee, to shout words of gratitude and adoration into the phone. When he opened his mouth, though, all that came out was a squawk that might have once been "Thank you" and an equally unprofessional, "Well, see ya."

The idea of hanging up didn't appeal to Drakken at all, actually. He would rather have stayed on there for hours, telling Senior all about his life to see if he could somehow make it make sense. But he had to end this conversation before it became imperfect in any way.

"All the best, Dr. Drakken," was Senior's reply, and not just because it was the polite thing to say. His voice was sincere, like he truly _did_ wish Drakken all the best.

Drakken hung fast, so he wouldn't have to hear the lonely dial tone drone in his ear. The phone promptly slid straight out of his sweaty hand and crashed to the floor. For the first time, he noticed his teeth were clacking together, and his jaw hurt like they'd been doing it for awhile.

As a matter of fact, _everything_ on him was shivering again, but not from cold or sickness or even fear. This was something strong and clean and more triumphant than triumph. The picture he'd had in his mind of Senior sneering at him, the one he'd dreaded all day, was replaced by an image of how he must have looked when they said good-bye: smiling calmly, the lines in his face gentle, his eyes almost tender. It swelled Drakken's chest until he was sure that his heart had grown three sizes, like the Grinch's.

He shot to his feet in glorious rapture or whatever you called this sort of joy, but his knees wobbled out from under him and he toppled belly-first onto the Thinking Ottoman. Rolling over onto his back, Drakken watched the sunbeams dance on the ceiling and paused to breathe in the light that barely hurt his eyes anymore. He should have been doing a dance of his own, but his legs were shaky and, for a minute, it didn't seem real.

That conversation had gone so much better than Drakken could've imagined, washing all the dirt away. There was still some embarrassment, but not the heavy feeling of shame. Senior was a genius, too - brilliant at scooping your self-esteem out of the mud and making you feel like a person again. Drakken wondered if he did that for _everyone_, or if it was something just for him. Secretly, he wished it was the latter, just because it had been so long since he'd been special to anybody who wasn't his mother.

Whatever the case, Drakken was happier than he'd been in quite awhile. He felt like he'd just leapt over the moon and landed on a sea of soft, fluffy pillows. He felt like he'd discovered a new element that was going to be named after him, a testament to his genius that would live on forever.

He felt like - the king of the world, even without someone to gloat to and his arch-nemesis forced to kneel before him.

Just like that, all of his dark doubts and itchy places disappeared, leaving behind only something warm sitting in the middle of his chest, like a pie fresh from the oven. He wasn't sure since it hadn't shown up for so long, but Drakken thought it might be hope.

He pumped his fists in the air and "YESSSSSSSSSS!" until he ran out of breath and had to stop and gasp. Inspiration suddenly striking him, Drakken sprang from the floor and flipped his logbook open to today's to-do list. With fingers still fluttering in relief, he jotted down one last item:

_*Let Senior have another island or something when I take over the world._

There! Drakken sank back into a sitting position, sighing with satisfaction, and let the book slip shut with a sigh of its own.

The thought of repaying Senior for his kindness made another relatively unfamiliar sensation creep up and curl around him - cozy and safe, the way a hug would surely be if it hadn't had to involve actually being touched. It was the same fuzzy feeling he'd gotten when Commodore Puddles first licked his cheek, when he'd paid for Shego's Christmas vacation, when he'd helped the buffoon's little naked creature repair the Attitudinator. A feeling that came so close when he was watching Snowman Hank he could almost touch it, a feeling he could only describe as "good."

Not "good" as in "healthy." Not "good" as in "successful." Not even "good" as in "brilliant."

Just - _good_.

The fragility of that thought made Drakken stop and examine his jagged nails. Usually that goodness only lasted for a few minutes, and he wasn't sorry to see it go. Drakken didn't need Jack Hench to tell him that a supervillain shouldn't enjoy feeling like a good person.

Whether it was the hangover or the talk with Senior or whatever, though, things didn't play out at all like usually. The fuzzy-wuzzies didn't leave, and Drakken didn't chase them away. He was content to smile drowsily and savor them, wrapped in a flannel blanket from the inside out. For a moment they didn't even seem to pose a threat to his evil level. After all, you could be a supervillain and still be a good person. Look at Senior. It was almost enough to make him forget about Dementor stealing his scheme.

Almost.

Drakken knew that, soon, there would be rage over that to send him into a furious monologue and frustration to make off with his words in mid-rant. There would be revenge to be plotted and doom traps to be designed. But, just for now, "almost" was close enough.


End file.
